I fully accept the Deputy's bona fides on this. Having been alongside him for seven years in the Oireachtas, I have seen his commitment to workers' rights and to health and safety in the workplace, which has followed from his own long professional experience in this area working across the trades and much else. The assurance I will give the Deputy on the floor of the House is that whatever the HSA needs from the Department in order to allow it to carry out this independent investigation fully and thoroughly will be…

-----respect and appreciate the Deputy's bona fides. I acknowledge how well documented they are. I do not want to pre-judge anything, and nor should I while I am sitting in this chair. However, I will absolutely work with the Deputy on this. Where we need to and can bring it forward, I hope we can do so together collaboratively, because when it comes to an issue as important as workplace safety and at a time of such sensitivity for two families in the constituency of the Deputy and the Acting Chair, it is our respo…

I thank the Senator sincerely for raising this timely and pertinent issue. It is an issue I am extremely interested in as the Minister of State responsible for retail and one about which I have serious concerns that affect all our communities. It is important to put a statistic out there. There are more than 225,000 retail workers in the State. It is the largest private sector employer in the State and has huge importance to our economy but crucially also to our communities. I think that goes to some of the points …

I will conclude briefly by thanking the Senator once again for raising this point and underlining the fact that I absolutely fundamentally agree with him, both in terms of his comments in relation to additional Garda resources but crucially, additional resources for the Courts Service. That is why I welcome the announcement by the Minister, Deputy Harris, of the recruitment of more judges. That only goes to one part of it. One cannot have a judge without an effective Courts Service with the ancillary staff that go …

As the Deputy knows, the closure of PayPal in Dundalk and overall redundancies in the tech sector are part of a wider and disappointing global trend, one from which Ireland has been relatively insulated. Regarding Dundalk, the north-east regional enterprise programme will commit to finding new investment for Louth and the wider region. I look forward to Ministers going across the world in the coming weeks to attract business into Louth and across the State.

I thank the Deputy for her kind welcome. Consistency is not a bad thing in life. From the outset, I can confirm that I have read Mandate's report, Smoke and Mirrors: The Facts About Retail Workers' Incomes in Ireland. Indeed, Mandate raised it with me directly when I met them a week prior to its publication. We had a discussion then and we have had subsequent discussions via email and telephone before and after the launch. I look forward to continuing to work closely with them on this report and other issues relati…

The review will be quick, but most importantly it will be thorough. We are dealing with legislation that was described as groundbreaking by Mandate when it was introduced. We owe it the duty of care to make sure there is a thorough review that addresses real, statistical issues. The report is very welcome and there is a lot of interesting data in it, but it must also be looked at in the round. It states that 60% of workers do not actually want extra hours, and of the 40% who do, only 20% are denied those hours by t…

Very briefly, there is not much difference here between the Deputy and me, which is welcome. The workers will appreciate that politicians from all corners are here to try to get better conditions for them and to work with employers to make it sustainable. There is not low pay in the retail sector, because the average is €17 per hour, but there is an issue with hours. That is something we can address. The salary rates are set, the employers are doing a good job and they are engaging with the unions. The workers are …

I understand the Deputy has already engaged quite a bit with the Department in relation to this Bill, which is very welcome and I encourage that going forward. As the Deputy is aware, the Joint Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment met in public session on 25 January to discuss detailed scrutiny of the Industrial Relations (Provisions in Respect of Pension Entitlements of Retired Workers) Bill 2021. Following this meeting, my Department was asked by the joint committee to provide a briefing in response to t…

As I said, serious concerns with the Bill were raised by my predecessor, and those concerns remain. While we are sympathetic to the plight and the case of the individuals who have been involved in drafting the Bill, many of whom I met as both a Senator and a Deputy, whether because they are my constituents or because they are members of other representative groups, there are several serious concerns with the legislation from the Government’s point of view. I touched on some of them in my initial response but I migh…

As outlined, I have met the groups previously in my capacities as a Senator and a Deputy, and I would be more than willing to meet them again with the Deputy. There are serious concerns about this approach and the serious impact it would have on the industrial relations mechanism. It is in all our interest to work towards a solution relatively quickly, and I am prepared to do that with the Deputy. I am new to this brief but perhaps we can arrange a meeting in the coming weeks with that representative body before th…

The minimum wage for those aged 19 and under is less than the minimum wage for those aged 20 and over, given that sub-minimum, or age-based, pay rates are in force. The latest figures available from the Central Statistics Office, CSO, using the labour force survey quarter 3 of 2022, show that there are an estimated 91,000 employees aged between 16 and 19. Of these, the CSO estimates 19,600 earn less than the full minimum wage. In most cases, 16,400 to be precise, this is because they are earning the relevant sub-mi…

It is a combined response to this question and the previous one. We both have to be careful in our language when we are talking about reports or anecdotal evidence versus empirical evidence. We do not want people to go out thinking that this is used across any sector, retail or otherwise, as suggested in terms of lower pay and the way hours are being allocated. There have been some reports of that, but having genuine, empirical evidence with real thorough research is very important in the context of this and the pr…

The Deputy knows all the arguments from the Low Pay Commission as well as I do. She knows the reasoning as to why this was introduced in the first place. She knows what the response would be to the points she has made about other jurisdictions that have changed this. What I will repeat is that the Low Pay Commission has been asked to look at the matter by the previous Minister. It will look at it and report to the Government by the end of this year. The Government will take those recommendations on board and act ac…

I thank the Deputy for this question. I do not think either of us thought it would be reached, but it is good it has been. This was discussed quite recently at a meeting of the Labour Employer Economic Forum, LEEF, between Ministers, employer representatives and representatives of trade unions. The high-level working group's recommendations will now be taken into consideration. They are going to a subgroup of the LEEF where we will discuss this and work it out. There are also, parallel to this, new European instruc…

-----but we are ahead of some EU member states. There is an appetite between the employer group representatives and the trade unions to work with the Government to make sure we can achieve this in a timely manner.

I fully agree with the Deputy. An efficient collective bargaining system is not just in the interest of the workers but also in the interest of the employers and, most importantly, the interest of the economy and society as a whole. We appreciate, and I agree with the Deputy, that 80% will be a challenge, but it is a challenge the Government is very much keen to rise to. The process has begun and, in due course, bringing in Members of the Oireachtas as part of that implementation process will be very important. I l…

As I mentioned, the Labour Employer Economic Forum discussed this last month. There will be a meeting of the subgroup to discuss this in March. Following that meeting, we will look at any legislative process, but that will be in discussion with European colleagues to see if we can meet the European ambitions as were announced at the Council meeting just two weeks ago.

I sincerely thank Senator Byrne for raising this really important issue. It is particularly pertinent given the Senator's personal experience as a businesswoman in Limerick for many years as well as her parallel political career that is continuing to thrive. I think we can all agree in this House today that we all want to see SMEs succeed. SMEs are the backbone of our economy. Small businesses have been through so much over the past few years, from Brexit to Covid and now this energy crisis. Having supported busine…

In conclusion, my Department, the Minister, Deputy Coveney and myself are committed to supporting businesses of all sizes throughout Ireland, but we are acutely aware of the impacts on smaller businesses. As I have mentioned, we have done a lot of work in this regard and we have made much progress, but there is always room for more. Crucial to that is the ongoing level of engagement and monitoring, not just with the representative bodies and the trade associations, but individually with businesses. There is an impo…