Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael)

I welcome this important motion and thank Labour Party colleagues for tabling it. The key message is that it is a statement of core values. What a legacy the Government will leave behind. First of all it breaks the country and then it leaves people in dire straits. Families are panicking and wondering how they will pay their weekly food bills. On top of all that, as a final stroke, the Government hits the minimum wage. It had done well on that previously, with our support because we all bought into this statement of core values. The minimum wage is about fairness and setting a mark in order to make it worthwhile to work. If the minimum wage is cut by another euro per hour, however, it will not be worth working. People also face the cost of getting to work, even though the Government has failed in many areas of public transport. Deputy Penrose and I represent rural areas where many people cannot just hop on a bus to work. Even where buses are available there are no free travel passes, so it costs money to get to work. The Government should make it worthwhile to work and thus, wages must cover costs as well as providing a decent amount of money to live on. That will not happen if the minimum wage is cut further, however. The cost of living in Ireland is not as cheap as in other countries.

Groups that attended Oireachtas committees to seek a reduction in the minimum wage never proved their case. We asked them to tell us honestly whether this was about trying to drive other wages down, because the minimum wage is often used as a benchmark, but they never came back to us with any answers. Last week, Ministers quoted documents which showed that if the minimum wage was increased by a certain amount there would be a corresponding loss of jobs. There is no conclusive proof that jobs will be lost by leaving the minimum wage as it is, however. If there were, we would have a proper discussion about it, but there is no proof. It is not good enough to make such incorrect statements.

What is the real history of this matter and who made the decision to reduce the minimum wage? Fianna Fáil TDs will be campaigning in the next couple of months saying that Europe or the IMF did this. They will say: "Sure, those boys in Europe are awful. We'd no choice". They will blame everybody else but that is not true. When we met Commissioner Ollie Rehn one of the first things he mentioned was the minimum wage. I found that very strange and wondered what relevance it had to our meeting with him. He said: "We'll have to address the minimum wage and will have to look at that". I asked him why he was singling out the minimum wage and he said it was not his call but something that we would have to look at. He said it had been discussed within the Government's plans. He said it was not his idea but it had obviously been put into his head by the Minister for Finance and other Ministers. It was the Government's idea to do this because it failed to tackle the cost of business across the board.

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