Dr. Micheál Collins:

I will pick up on two of the Senator’s points. There is an issue surrounding the sustainability of the State’s involvement in dealing with the scale of income inequality or low wages. We can see this in the significant growth in family income supplement over time. There is a great deal of merit in having family income supplement as a transitory payment for workers who need assistance, but as it moves to becoming a permanent feature of the labour market, it is a concern. The numbers have been going up over time.

The overall effort the social protection system is making is very significant. There were several reports last week of Ireland being at European levels of income fairness or inequality. This is principally delivered by the State in redistributing. There is, however, a great fear that it will be difficult for it to sustain this task in the future. That brings us back to the fact that while we need a good social protection system and good public services, we need a more adequate base of direct income and earnings.

There is merit in joining the dots between the provision of public services and pay requirements. If there is poor provision for public services, more people will have to spend money and, therefore, have to earn more. Figures for items such as the living wage would be higher. The living wage figure I mentioned could fall if there were better public services because people would not need as much money to maintain a particular standard of living.

When the living wage technical group was working through the data last year, as well as reporting a living wage figure, we stated we would show a family living cost because individuals and couples with children faced such significantly higher costs. There were dramatic costs, fundamentally linked with differences in child care costs and the different costs incurred by children. Child care costs were significant. We felt it was completely unfair to ask employers to carry the cost because of the fact that there were deficiencies in the public sector and public service provision. We should, therefore, be thinking about these, too.