In a letter to the editor in the Irish Times this week on reader asked: "If we have a minimum wage, why not a maximum one?"

Its author, Jim O’Sullivan from Sligo, told Lunchtime Live why he thinks it is a good idea.

"Ireland is regarded as one of the wealthier countries ... but at the same time, we have very high levels of poverty."

"This is particularly the case among children."

"We all know the problems that we're having regard to people trying to access basic utilities and the housing crisis and so forth."

"The wage inequality here is continuing to grow, and it seems to me that there isn't any opportunities to radically alter our situation on behalf of governments."

Wage disparity controls

Mr O'Sullivan would not put a figure on what exactly he believes the maximum wage should be, instead saying that that the focus should be on narrowing the wage gap between the highest earning employee in a company and the lowest.

"I think that at this stage now, it is necessary to try and get some control on this because I believe that we can very quickly run into problems with regard to social cohesion and all the rest of it if we don't."

Inflation

Listener Mark is against the concept of a maximum wage but agrees that something must be done to increase control around wages.

"You're always going to have some level of inflation, even though of course it's very high at the minute", he said.

"We have to allow for the value of what people are getting as a wage not to decrease."

"That applies for obviously those and low wages and those and high wages to a certain degree, although the higher role might be less popular concept."

"What people have talked about in regards to this is not so much that we cap a maximum wage, but that we link CEO pay to the lowest paid worker."

"Socialist type concept"

Currently, in the United States, a CEO gets paid 350 times more than the company's lowest paid worker. While an average Norwegian CEO gets paid approximately 11 times more, despite there being no legal control over their wage disparity.

Mark believes OECD agreements would be needed, similarly to corporation tax.

"We all want to have governments make sure that we're all making kind of a fair share money here, but where's the benefit to governments, you know, because they're obviously going to be under the pressure of heavy business lobbying."

"It's a more kind of socialist type concept. It's hard to convince people to go down that road."

Listen back to the full conversation.