Professor James Wickham:

I am not a macro-economist, but there are a couple of important points here. Undoubtedly if people have unpredictable incomes they are not going to make long-term financial decisions. We know that. I have already said that they cannot plan, which is important for economists because it deals with the labour force, having children and setting up families and such like.

There is a much more immediate macro-economic issue which is often totally ignored here, which is the sort of labour force that exists. If there is an industry that depends on a high turnover of people, on people who are employed and let go or employed very variably, it means immediately that there will be very little training. The level of skill in the workforce is probably going to decline. That means in turn that the industry is going to be increasingly relying for success on wage competition rather than quality. We can see that in sections of the hospitality industry. We have been able to find firms who made sure that they did retain their employees, did offer regular hours, and they were rapidly competing in terms of the quality of the service, food and hospitality they were able to give.

There is another industry where this slide to the bottom is now well documented, and that is the construction industry. The construction workforce - we have done work on this and written about it - has not only been decimated in terms of numbers but has been casualised in rather different ways than what we have been talking about here. One of the consequences of that is that there has been no training in construction. We have a skill shortage again in construction. That also means that Irish firms do not have the skills base to compete domestically or internationally. If an industry is organised with a race to the bottom in terms of quality it ends up competing purely on wages. That is the risk.