Barry, Mick

Financial Resolution No. 2: General (Resumed) (Continued)

I wish to make some comments on the proposed change to the national minimum wage. There has been insufficient commentary on this in the past 24 hours. The proposal is to increase the minimum wage...

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the all-Ireland football final, between Dublin and Mayo, on the television. Croke Park was packed, containing 82,000 people. The number of people in this...

This measure affects not only the people who are currently paid €9.15 per hour but also the hundreds of thousands of workers who currently try to live or exist on low pay. The national minimum w...

According to the OECD, in 2013, 23.3% of the workforce, or nearly one in four, were low-paid workers. According to the union Unite, which produced this summer an excellent report entitled "The t...

It was argued the minimum wage increase was so small because of the Brexit factor. This is a chilling warning to give to low-paid workers in this country. Brexit is not going away; it will feat...

There is a deep irony in using Brexit as the excuse for this. What did the Brexit vote represent? Admittedly, the question of immigration came into the mix and clouded the picture somewhat but,...

With regard to tax breaks for landlords and raising the threshold for inheritance tax, does the Government realise that a worker on the new minimum wage would have to work for 43 years before acc...

My colleague Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett made the point yesterday that it seems there is provision for the building of just 1,500 council houses in the State next year. The Minister for Public E...

The CSO produced figures very recently showing the wealthiest 20% of households control 73% of the wealth in the State, but that the 20% at the bottom of the ladder control 0.2%.

That is a differential of 365:1, which is a huge social inequality. I put it to the Government that it is likely to be even greater next year, after this budget. At the same time that public tran...

It would still be the same as in the Netherlands, Austria and Denmark, where there is plenty of corporate investment, and it would be less than in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Norwa...

In concluding the debate yesterday, the Minister, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, said, and seemed to put a certain store on saying, that the centre can hold and stay firm. His reference to the centre s...

However, for the purpose of this debate, let us leave that to one side and use the designation the two parties choose for themselves, namely, the centre. I will tell them now why the centre cann...

Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil saw what happened last year and the year before when large numbers of ordinary people came to the conclusion that we need to get rid of water charges. We are going to d...