Mr. Ciar?n Nugent:

Today's report is from the first half of 2022. Deprivation rates increased by approximately four points, which is somewhere in the region of 200,000 people. The minimum wage increase, although it was not the biggest percentage increase ever, is already worth less, in real terms, than it was in 2020. There is a bit of a lag with those deprivation indicators. In the past year, the wage data are a little bit up to date. We know that wages fell, on average, by approximately 5% or 6% in the past year. We will get some more data next week. They will likely be even worse than that. There is a bit of a lag. More people are likely to be in deprivation, as we speak, than the 17% who were in deprivation in 2022. That is the reason cost-of-living benchmarking, indexing, etc., are so important. The example I always give is the at-risk-of-poverty threshold, which is the classic 60% of the median income. Through the years of the great financial crisis, it hardly moved. It did not rise. Everybody who lived through that knows that poverty rose in that time. We could be looking at something similar. We could measure people whose standard of living decreases over a year, but considering it not have decreased, if we calculate it on these relative income measures.