Barra Roantree

So I think it's something that the government can choose to do, but it's a very expensive thing to do.

So Jim McCallaghan highlighted being over 50% as the key issue for him and that it kicks in very low.

That's true.

It does kick in relatively low.

We have a tax system in Ireland where average earners pay actually very low average tax rates.

If you take the amount of tax and take that as a share of their salary, it's quite low.

But then that marginal rate kicks in.

What the marginal rate is, is the bit that you pay on any increase in earnings.

So that is...

relatively high.

Yeah, exactly.

And that kicks in lower than other countries.

So it's something the government can do.

But if they wanted to, say, reduce that margin rate to 49%, that's going to be 1.5 billion.

And that's about a third of the cost of each year of Jim O'Callaghan's department.

So I think the question then for politicians is, well, what are you going to cut or where are you going to raise taxes instead?

Because this isn't a free decision.

Not at average.

At higher earnings, yes, but not at average.

Once you add in Social Security contributions, actually, things are not that different.