Mr. Seamus Coffey:

Senator Quinn alluded to the progression of employees. It is clear that the incidence of low pay is much higher for younger people and it declines as people get older. The rates in Ireland are relatively high across the age profile, but they do decline. For those under 30, the incidence of low pay is around 40%, yet it is down to 20% for those between 30 and 39. Perhaps those are relatively high rates, but it does decline.

I would not quite say that we do not have a safety net for the self-employed. They are not entitled to unemployment benefit, but one cannot get insurance against a risk one can trigger oneself, so we are not particularly unusual in that regard. There is a certain safety net in that everybody is entitled to unemployment assistance. It is means-tested, so that if somebody has the means, they will not get the money, but the safety net is there. The issue is that if there is a basic benchmark for everybody, we can reduce some of these anomalies.

The issue of low pay in the self-employed sector deserves more scrutiny. The focus here is on pay for employees but there are significant difficulties in the self-employed sector, whether it is, as Deputy Tóibín referred to, people classifying themselves as self-employed despite not working very much at all, or the difference in the tax treatment of employees and the self-employed, in that an employee gets the employee tax credit, but there is no self-employed tax credit. The reason for that might be high-earning self-employed people, who can use expenses to reduce their overall tax liability. A self-employed person earning very little has no tax liability to off-set against. This is something worth considering at the bottom of the pay distribution for the self-employed. The broad point I am making is that we should have a more universal safety net, rather than one that targets individual groups.