Joe O'Toole (Independent)

We need to discuss the matter. I am not putting this in any assertive way to Senator Butler and I do not query his good intentions. However, people need to understand why we need the facts before us this time. I agree we need to share the pain. We should have a view that anybody who speaks in this House should propose a solution that covers everybody. Income and wage restraint are fine. However, we need to remember that is called profit for some people, wages and income for others, and all sorts of fees for others again. We should look to the people who got us into this mess, the bankers and the builders. There should be an extra tax on bankers who are still making €1.7 billion profit this year. We should consider a means to protect people at the lower end on the minimum wage to ensure those outside the tax net are not brought inside it. Everybody would be prepared to consider the introduction of taxation for people earning more than €100,000 a year — or whatever figure. I am sure the trade union movement will not be found wanting in supporting that kind of progressive programme.

In any discussion we have on the matter there should be an objective. Why would people have a pay pause? Why would we share the pain? What are we trying to achieve? What we are trying to achieve can be articulated, quantified or measured by benchmarks through interest rates, economic growth or inflation. People would then know when we reach that point we have achieved the target and then the pain can be relieved. People need to be clear about the state we are in at present, what we need to do to achieve our target in a way that will be shared by everybody and how we will know when we are out of it. We have none of that information at the moment. We should not buy into listening to bankers' economists telling us how bad things are. They are the people who told us how good things were not that long ago and guided us into this mess in the first place.