Social Welfare and Automatic Enrolment Retirement Savings System (Amendment) Bill 2025: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2025-11-12 ============================================================ Mattie McGrath (IND), Tipperary South I cannot follow that. I do not know if there is any farm relief in Kerry. I know they will not be there to calve the cows. If you had twins in, God help us altogether. I am delighted to be able to speak on this Bill. I have concerns. I have to declare that I am a board member of a business that employs a considerable number of people. There are not enough of us employers in this Chamber. I know the Ceann Comhairle is an employer. Deputy Healy-Rae has been an employer for a long time and I have been one since 1982. There are not enough of us. If there were, this legislation would not be coming through in droves and heaps - involving health and safety and everything else - without a fair and reasonable assessment as to the impact it will have on employers. I am all for a fair day's wages for a fair day's work, and we have great employees and a great relationship. I salute them. Without them, my company and Deputy Healy-Rae's company would not function. We have to have fairness and some consideration for the small employers. They are the backbone of the country. I have heard some comments here, and I fully agree with them. The small man has no organisation to represent him. Small businesses have to organise all the work and make sure the money is in the bank to pay. It used to be Friday evening but now it is Wednesday with bank transfers. It is so important in rural Ireland especially and in urban Ireland that small businesses are supported. Ní neart go cur le chéile. Tá aithne ag an Aire ar an seanfhocal sin. It is so important. We are all in this together. This auto-enrolment is disgraceful, it sounds great but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We are heading towards Christmas. Hopefully we will have a bit of Christmas pudding and a bit of custard. The pain of this is that, while it might start small, it goes incrementally up every year. The penalties are €50,000 and jail. Every letter that businesses get now from Revenue lists the jail term at the end. That is fine for the rogues and the people who have to deal with CAB and all but not for the ordinary business person who is working hard and managing one employee or five, ten, 15, 20, 30 or 40 employees. Enterprise Ireland, IBEC and other entities will not talk to you unless you have 50 or more employees. That is a lot of money of a Wednesday. Then there is the PRSI and the insurance schemes and all that goes with that. Deputy Healy-Rae alluded to the new paternity leave and the domestic leave now as well. They are all grand; some of them are needed. Some people need them and I am not saying they do not. However, they all have a cumulative, huge impact on the employer and on the employer's ability to stay going and keep the ship afloat. There are insurance costs, electricity costs, oil costs and carbon tax, that cursed thing. Carbon tax is the biggest fake that was ever imposed by this House. We have not been able to debate it for ten years. It is just added every year to the budget as a measure that comes in. Then we find out, when I asked the Taoiseach about the couple of hundred million - €680 million, I think - that it did not go into where it was supposed to go at all. No, it is gone off in a piggy bank for some other nice lucrative schemes. I met people today talking about the CPOs. I am sorry for diverging a small bit here but I am sick to the teeth of all these grand active travel schemes and we cannot get a shilling to fix a bridge, maintain a road or take out a bad bend. Engineers in Waterford County Council and Tipperary County Council are telling me this. There is money for active travel, for tomfoolery schemes such as putting cycle lanes along a couple of hundred yards of a road like they have done in my area----- --- 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/dail/2025-11-12/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:05+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-11-12