Social Welfare and Automatic Enrolment Retirement Savings System (Amendment) Bill 2025: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2025-11-12 ============================================================ Mattie McGrath (IND), Tipperary South They start here and finish there and go nowhere. We can have cycling and walking lanes and we cannot have money to improve low-cost accident schemes and very important life-saving measures. They showed me a cantilevered part of that greenway today. It was in the Minister's own county, I think. I could be wrong. It may be Galway. They were putting in this massive cantilevered walkway costing billions, not millions. They obviously had money for this if they were proposing it. I am sure the architects have got millions already to design it. We have a bridge in Ardfinnan that is closed with a one-way system for the last 12 to 13 years and we have to have more consultants reports, with the money we have spent on it. Now we have a lovely design for a stand-alone footbridge but it is going to cost €7.5 million. If we spent €2 million on the bridge the first day, it would have been repaired. I hate saying this but I have said it many times. The night of the flood I was on the bridge or beside it. They closed the bridge for the fear. It is a pity it did not go in the flood that night because we would have had a new bridge long ago. I diverted a small bit there but the cumulative impact of all these grandiose schemes is that you have money for things that you do not need at all. The cost burden on employers will include mandatory contributions starting at 1.5% gross salary, rising to 6% over ten years. SMEs operating on tight margins are going to be crucified and that is the simple fact of it. They are only barely surviving. They are nearly under water as it is, with so many increased costs. The administrative complexity highlights ongoing compliance requirements such as monitoring employee eligibility, managing opt-outs and non-enrolments, and updating payroll systems. Who is going to do that in a small business? Is mo bhean chéile a dhéanann é sin sa ghnó atá againne. The bean chéiles are worn out and tired. We do not have the staff like they do in the Departments, the county councils or wherever to pass the work on to this, that or the other secretary. It is a single man and a woman running a business on their own and they are nearly fatigued with the amount of red tape and a lot of baloney that is coming down on top of them. I have no truck for anyone who does not want to have insurance and does not look after their workers and make sure of their health and safety but bucketloads are being fired at them and a lot of it is nonsensical. An awful lot of it is nonsensical but it is making good jobs for the gang, the new brigade we have going around, such as the fellas from the health and safety office and all these inspectors. Most of them could not drive a machine if you gave them the whole of Ireland and yet they can tell you how to drive and operate it safely. It is pure nonsense. I have spoken in the House about the National Employment Rights Authority, NERA, many times. That should be changed to a supporting organisation, especially after the last recession. We had a bit of a boom but now we have tightened up seriously again and are heading into very dark times and choppy waters. NERA should be changed to a national employers support because if we do not have employers, we will not have the jobs. It is as simple as it gets dark this evening at 5 o'clock and it will be daylight in the morning at 7.30 a.m. or 7 o'clock. It is as simple as that. We are not going to have those employers if we do not nurture and mind them. We have not nurtured them for decades. We have put more paperwork on top of them. We are smothered with it. It is paperwork after paperwork. I mentioned earlier about IBEC and organisations like that. IBEC has said it supports the principle of the auto-enrolment - of course it does - but emphasises the need for alignment with other cost pressures. That is what I am talking about: the costs. It could not be coming in at a worse time than now because things are very tight. Margins are very tight because there is no record or account of the insurance costs or the claims. We have talked about reports. Goodness knows, we have offices and agencies now for everything. Useless, toothless and fruitless is what I call all these bodies that are supposed to be looking after the costs to protect the consumers. They are not protecting the consumers; they are fattening themselves. They have the brass plaque up on the wall, the nice office furniture, a big office chair, a fine big job and a team under them. They are costing a fortune. NERA has six offices all over the country. It has the finest of offices. There are many others. We know about all the NGOs that are milking this country and leaving it high and dry but it is the same with these so-called watchdogs that we are setting up. There are so many and we would set up another. The Taoiseach has set up more investigations, organisations and everything else than he has had hot dinners during his time as Minister and as Taoiseach and they are doing nothing only pushing paper. The vast majority of them, as I said, are not fit for purpose. They are jobs for the boys, most of them retired people from here or the Civil Service. They are persecuting people who are the enablers, who want to get the work done, who want to employ themselves first and then employ others and grow their businesses. These are people with good relationships with their employees. They do not want to be lectured and told what to do with legislation after legislation without any pre-legislative scrutiny. Even if we had that here, and this is a criticism of my colleagues, there are not enough self-employed people in this House. They do not have the time nor the energy to go for it because they are too busy working. We have plenty solicitors, barristers, some doctors and whatever else - professional people - but we do not have any self-employed people. This is a sign we are out of kilter with the ordinary working small businesses. If you are out of kilter with the small business people, you are out of kilter with their employees. If you push them out of existence, we will have people on the social welfare. Where will that get us? What I am saying here is ten or maybe 15 years too late. It has just gone beyond a joke. In the name of dead generations and the future generations, we should cry "Halt" here, look at what we are doing to employers and see if can we support them rather than persecute them. --- 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