Dr. Tom McDonnell:

If you are making adjustments to labour taxes, whether it is through rebates or whatever, you want to do it in a way that does not create cliff edges or incentives to keep hours at a particular rate, or where someone will reach a certain income level and then suddenly the employer is hit by a much higher PRSI rate. Those issues relate to a fundamental flaw in our taxation and welfare system, which is that we have lots of ceilings and cliff edges that apply in respect of medical cards, HAP or whatever. If one was to go down that route, one would have to be very careful how it was designed in order not to create those disincentives that effectively lock people out of working extra hours. That can be very technical and difficult to do. I would be cautious in that regard. If there are to be supports for business, we would like them to be general supports for business rather than sector-specific ones because it is the economy as a whole that matters. We have these artificial notions of sector A, sector B and sector C, but it is the economy, employment, profits and opportunities as a whole that matter. As a result, that is where we see the focus as being. We think you are better off engineering a system that reduces those market failures, for instance, in terms of the cost of energy, which would bring down costs for all businesses, as being the type of direction in which you want to go. Hence, our focus on infrastructure and things like that as being more important.