National Minimum Wage (Inclusion of Young Persons, Apprentices and Interns) Bill 2025: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2025-12-17 ============================================================ Joe O'Reilly (FG), Labour Panel I welcome my colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Dillon, to the House. I recognise the great work he does in his Department and how proactive he is. I look forward to hearing his views on this matter. I congratulate Senator Cosgrove and her colleague on introducing the Bill. It is a great thing that they have initiated this debate. I believe in principle and will commend to the Minister of State, and in other forums to my party, that we have to make this a position that we want to achieve. We have to implement a minimum wage for all workers, irrespective of age, status, etc. By and large, they do the same work. I will come back to all of that. There are a few interesting things in the Bill. I attended the briefing today. There are some interesting statistics and I would like to hear the response of the Minister of State. Roughly five out of six employers already pay the minimum wage to all of their workers. A small section do not. That is a relevant statistic. Of course, a change in the rate could be challenging for some employers. We will have to find ways of supporting those employers. We went some way towards that with the VAT rates set down in the budget. There were initiatives in Covid around rates, etc. There will have to be ways to deal with this. Nobody wants to put employers out of business. I live in the real world and meet a lot of people. I would be the first to recognise that this is challenging for particular employers. In those instances, strategies have to be devised as part of the solution. The solution for those employers is not to put them into a different category of wage rates from the general ones. They should instead be put in tandem with other employers who already paying particular rates. That is a very important point. The argument that we should recognise the small number of employers who will have difficulty and that we need to support them holds up very strongly. The other side of the House has made the point that children and young people are no longer in a position whereby the lower rates are an important disincentive to leaving school. Cultural attitudes and values have changed fundamentally in society in this regard, and thank God they have changed. We have to recognise that. That is an unnecessary canard at this stage. The big issue that has jumped out at me, not just at the briefing I attended today, but on common sense and observation is the whole question around apprenticeship. This is a critical issue. The Minister of State would have much more knowledge in this sphere and he might comment on this. My understanding is that, by 2030, we will need 80,000 more craftworkers to achieve our infrastructural and housing ambitions. If that is to be the case, we have to encourage apprenticeship. There is no logic in saying to young people that they should become apprentices. There is nothing glamorous about getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning to go in a van to Dublin. Yet it is a wonderful thing to do an apprenticeship and achieve a trade, but you have to make it attractive for apprentices. There is no way out of paying them. Quite apart from a moral and ethical position on this that everyone is equal under the law, under God and in society, there is a more economic need to do this because we need to attract apprentices. We need to train up electricians and craftspeople across a whole range of people. Those are the arguments. I am interested in the Minister of State's response. The last thing I will say on this is all work is equally valuable. My understanding is that it is the case, as Senator Tully said, that if somebody goes into catering or whatever work they go into, they fundamentally do the same work from day 1. There will be a short learning curve, but they are fundamentally doing the same work. My good colleague and friend, Senator Crowe, would have much more expertise in this area. It is my understanding that they basically do the same. I look forward to the Minister of State's response. It is something that we should be committed to achieving and to put in the processes to get it done. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. 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