Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

I am pleased to have the opportunity to conclude this debate on behalf of the Labour Party. As the party's president, I am proud it put down this motion defending those on the minimum wage. The Labour Party has also made it clear that when it enters government, the order to reduce the minimum wage will be rescinded. I pay tribute to my colleague, Deputy Penrose, who prepared a researched alternative proposal to reducing the minimum wage. I thank Members of Fine Gael, Sinn Féin and the Technical Group for the support they have given to this Labour Party motion.

There have been some excellent speeches on this motion. I thank all my comrades in the Labour Party for the different views they have presented. No one disagrees the economy has been brought to a point of near destruction by a small group of unscrupulous people in the banking sector. The economy could actually be saved in a relatively short time, irrespective of the Government's proposals, if it were just about deficit.

Since November 2008 and the banking guarantee, however, the consequences of the actions of a small group of bankers, fewer than 100, were joined to the problems of the economy. This is the small group of people who sat on each other's remuneration committees, several of whom were members of five different boards. This group really brought this economy and society to its knees. Now, we see these very same people swanning around the Continent with relative impunity. May that impunity soon come to an end.

The Government repeats a series of allegations and assertions about the minimum wage that are simply untrue. It claims Ireland has the highest minimum wage rate in Europe. It does not. In fact, it is between the sixth and ninth highest minimum wage in the EU. If child care and housing provision, for example, were factored into it, one would find the rate was further down the European ladder. Neither is there any connection between reducing the minimum wage and decreases in unemployment. Reducing the income of those on the minimum wage and taking €150 million out of the economy will actually have a deflationary effect which will, as a consequence, lead to further job losses.

Those on the minimum wage know where every cent goes and are forced to spend their income not on luxuries but to survive. On the other hand, those at the very top, on whom Fianna Fáil and the Greens refuse to put a higher separate tax rate, do not spend all their income to survive. They are the ones who enjoyed the €11 billion in tax escapes for the past several years. Why will the Government not start there?

I am most attracted to the concept of the social floor. We regularly insult language by saying we live in a Republic. We do not. If we had any version of citizenship, there would be a social floor for health and housing for example, a threshold below which no citizen would be allowed to fall. Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate in economics, claims the test of one's citizenship is one's ability to participate in society without shame. The minimum wage is about the right of people to go about the ordinary things one should be able to do in a free and decent society, be it education, health or housing. Those who cut the income of those on the minimum wage are visiting poverty on those earners and their children. That is a disgrace. Words are like ashes in their mouths when they say "treat all the children of the nation equally". How can a mother on the minimum wage treat her child the same as everyone else when she loses €40 a week out of her basic wage of just over €300.

Who are those on the minimum wage? Up to 60% are women working in the hospitality and retail sector. Many of them are migrants, the very people we have humiliated enough already. They are also caught in that grey and dark area of the home-care industry.

There is a myth that the minimum wage is stopping Ireland coming out of recovery. How dare the Government make such an assertion? As one who has dealt with social statistics all my life, I have seen not one jot of evidence to substantiate this claim. As our economy recovers, one test must be to examine how much more inclusion can be made possible. That is why we must transfer income through taxation. How much exclusion is a consequence of current taxation policy? Every euro taken fromv those on the minimum wage creates exclusion in spending that will have a knock-on employment effect and will drive them and their families further into poverty.

There is a cynicism in all of this debate. For those who earn over €200,000 a year, the new combined PRSI and health levy will save them money while everyone else pays more. This is cynically referred to as an anomaly. Is it not an anomaly that the Government has gone after the poorest in society?

What kind of a message does this send out? The minimum wage is used as a standard for other wages in other sectors of the economy. The reduction in the minimum wage can be used as a battering ram against all sectors. Once it goes down, everyone else's wages along the scale will come down too. That is why those on middle incomes should stand with those dependent on the minimum wage. If the Government goes after those dependent on the minimum wage this week, next week it will certainly go after the middle-income earners.

The very last people the Government will ever go after, however, are the non-executive directors, the dining club members. These are the people who put the poison from their own little companies into the Financial Regulator's office, the Central Bank and the Department of Finance. They now sit around with their failed version of the economy for which generations will pay.

It is time for a debate on restoring the economy and, more important, putting ethics back into society. It is time we linked the economy to society to insist no child ever goes hungry, that no woman on the minimum wage must worry about how she will compensate for the school trip she promised her child but was forced to cancel because it was too dear. It must be a society in which a father is never forced to go home without anything to offer his children. Those are the conditions of the poor charted by Sean O'Casey. That was Sean O'Casey's Ireland. He, of course, was unlike the Seanie who plays golf with other notables and who could get a public servant to say to him, "Right on Seanie. Fair play to you."

To those who want a debate on reviving the economy, it must be a reasonable one about matters that are above the line of necessary citizenship. Let us agree that is what a real republic would be if we were making a beginning. Let us agree on the line below which no one will be allowed to fall. Let us agree it should be there to protect from birth to old age. Let us do it in the education sector by stating that every child shall be entitled to an education. Let us also do it concerning other things, such as public participation. When we begin to do that, democrats can debate the shape of the Republic. Until we do so, however, the Government will be making one shameful adjustment after another. What is the Government really saying? Those who vote to reduce the minimum wage are saying that the people who are dependent on it are of less importance than others in society. As a republican and as a socialist, I condemn that attitude. That is why I am proud to ask everybody in this House to support the Labour Party's motion.

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