NEWTON'S OPTIC:IRELAND HAS "lost the plot" and must reduce the minimum wage, according to Patricia Callan, director of the Small Firms Association (SFA).
Any SFA warning on this subject must be treated with the utmost seriousness. In 1998, two years before the minimum wage was introduced, the SFA told the National Minimum Wage Commission that an initial £4.40 hourly rate would cost 150,000 jobs. As we now know, this is exactly what happened. Few who lived through those appalling times can forget the scenes of destitution.
In 2002 tánaiste Mary Harney increased the minimum wage by 38 per cent to €6.35 an hour. The SFA again warned that this would cost jobs but the advice fell on deaf ears as socialist firebrand Harney pressed on with her redistributive agenda. Tragically, the SFA was proved correct once more as joblessness rose even further. By now Ireland had acquired its first soup kitchens since the Famine and its first ever non-Protestant soup kitchens.
In 2003 the government announced that it was raising the rate to €7 an hour. The SFA replied that the minimum wage was already "a major problem" for 26 per cent of its members. When the new rate came in the following year 26 per cent of small businesses duly went under, plunging the State into the worst recession in its history. Across the world, Ireland became a byword for economic failure and a warning to other far-left regimes.
The SFA also warned that "we could be looking at a situation in which low-skilled employees no longer have a place in the Irish labour market".
This piercing insight was sadly borne out as tens of thousands of young Irish people emigrated to seek whatever work they could find in Poland, Latvia and Brazil.
In 2005 the budget removed everyone on the minimum wage from tax, thereby removing the SFA's ability to call for tax cuts instead of a higher minimum wage. In response, the SFA warned that a higher minimum wage would "encourage more young people to leave school early, without the necessary qualifications for advancement".
It can hardly be a coincidence that this period saw the sharpest decline in Irish third-level education since Archbishop McQuaid denounced Trinity as "a soup-ladling hole".
The minimum wage was raised again in 2006 and 2007, despite more protests from the SFA, finally destroying what remained of the Irish economy. Only the arrival of food aid from Zimbabwe prevented parts of the country from descending into cannibalism.
After a decade of disaster, during which the number of employees on the minimum wage soared inexorably down to 3 per cent, the SFA is now asking for a modest €1 an hour cut plus a new "sub-minimum training rate" to prevent youth unemployment.
This will presumably need to be higher than the lower rate which the SFA previously claimed was tempting young people into employment, yet also lower than the current rate which the SFA claims is too high.
Of course, economic circumstances have since altered.
"Ireland is now into an era of rapid and increasingly unpredictable change," warns the SFA. Who better to guide it through the challenges ahead than an organisation with such an impressive track record of predictable predictions?