National Minimum Wage (Inclusion of Young Persons, Apprentices and Interns) Bill 2025: Second Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2025-12-17
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Joe Conway (IND), Cultural and Educational Panel

I stand here in admiration of my dear colleagues Senators Cosgrove and Harmon, the other Members in their group and the people who are here on the days before Christmas, at a time when lots of other people are amuigh ag cóisirí agus ag déanamh ceoil sna tithe tábhairne ar fud na cathrach anocht.
We are here to signal our stance, which is that we are with the Senators who have proposed this enlightening Bill. This time last year, I was given a book by a friend titled The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Many people here will know it and will have read it. It was written by a chap called Robert Tressell, which was the pen name of a Dublin lad called Robert Noonan. He detailed the life of a painter in Edwardian England. Noonan died from tuberculosis. In his book, he outlined the grim struggles that people had in the trades then trying to make ends meet, and the absolute connivance and exploitation, as well the lack of fixity in the employment of his friends. It was an odious story, but an enlightening one that illustrated the human ability to exploit one another.
Many of us would know Ken Burns's excellent series on the civil war in America. That was only 50 years prior to Robert Tressell's book. That was on a fundamental basis of exploitation as well, in the guise of a thing called slavery, which of course we all abhor now at this remove. The common thread is that different work and different effort were treated differently for different people. If one believes in the essence of human dignity, one has to abhor that state. Every person has the right to sell their labour at the going rate. That inalienable right of every person is at the basis of the proposed legislation. It signals that if you are young or, in the case of some of the population, if you are old, you should not have the cost of your labour truncated or minimised because of the number of years you have spent on the earth. It is a fundamental good that you are selling, and you have the right to get fundamentally fair pay for it. That is what we are talking about here.
I am not going to take up much time because the points are very simple. I appeal to the Minister of State and Government Members. They can spend the night citing statistics on this question, but statistics will not alter the basic truth. The basic truth is that this is about fairness, equality and the inalienable right of people to put a price on their wage and not to have it minimised. When Abraham Lincoln was trying to bring the southern states around to his way of thinking on the slavery question, he said he was appealing to "the better angels of our nature". Senators on the Government side and the Minister and State should not give us the old claptrap about this. There was no problem getting €700 million for the hospitality industry. However, when youngsters are trying to get a fair deal in the wage market, there is no €700 million for them because they will be discriminated against and paid the lower wage. That is not sustainable.
In the spirit of righteousness and "the better angels" of their nature, Government Senators cannot oppose the logic, fairness and rightness of this Bill. All the figures and statistics that have will be thrown out in this debate do not mean anything because this is all about fairness and the right to equal pay for equal work. It is as fundamental as that.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2025-12-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:28+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-17