Mr. Gerard Brady:

On public transport funding, interest rates are less than 0.5%. One can get 100-year money for 2% interest. It makes sense to debt-finance much of that. The Government is still running a deficit but, according to the budget documents, it will have a surplus of approximately €2 billion on current spending. It remains to be seen whether that will come through in light of the weakness in tax receipts. Approximately half of the infrastructure funding we included would be paid for by money we save. More could be funded out of debt. There are issues with fiscal rules, a matter to which we have drawn attention at different forums. It should be debt-funded. It makes no sense to increase taxes to pay for it when it is possible to borrow at 0.5% for ten years.

I do not know what figures Senator Gavan is pulling from agri-manufacturing in respect of zero-hour contracts. There are problems in the primary agriculture sector, where there is a lot of tenuous and low-paid work, particularly in the case of self-employed people. Irish agri-manufacturing tends to have some of the best pay in Europe. We recently wrote about this in Food and Drink Industry Ireland. The average wage in Irish agri-manufacturing is €40,000 per annum, which is well above the average industrial wage. There are definitely areas where there is probably more part-time work.

Our point about Brexit is to avoid putting extra costs on some sectors that already have high costs. Wages are being increased and that affects approximately 64% of our members.

Imposing extra regulations on companies which are already in a precarious position in retaining jobs makes very little sense. I would not accept that it is widespread or rampant, which is the word the Senator used.