Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

The Deputy will appreciate that I do not agree with him. In reply to the Deputy's last question on pay levels, the reason our competitiveness is out of line is because our pay levels, when set against our main competitors, are much higher across practically all professions and strands. The Deputy referred to hard-pressed workers. In most of these sectors they would be thankful because the social partnership process, along with the system which allows people to negotiate in this way, has given them much higher increases than any other system. People are engaged in this process across all sectors.

As for our own budgetary policies, I am sure the Deputy also read in the newspapers that the ESRI has shown that our last budget was the most progressive ever seen in this country. It strongly favoured low income groups. The ESRI found that gains for the poorest 20% of the population were more than 6% while those for the top income groups only came to 2%. When it reviewed the budgetary impact from 2002 onwards, it found a similar pattern. Hence, the overall net impact over the past five years has been to boost incomes in the lowest income groups by between 8% and 17% while incomes in the higher groups have seen very small income gains.

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