Mr. Gerry Light:

Perhaps the direct question was not raised and this is more of a comment. I reiterate what I said earlier. We are in no way suggesting that all employers are bogus. Probably more than anyone else we are working with the employers who have struggled in recent years and we are getting their employees to work with them through our guidance to ensure that they are in a better place if and when we come out of this recession. We are acutely aware of that and therefore we do not tar everyone with the one brush. We are only too glad to promote the cause of good employers.

I thank Deputy Calleary for his kind comments about our Shopfloor magazine. A good deal of hard work goes into it and it is good to see that recognised. We launched a key initiative at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions biennial conference in Belfast this year and we promoted it heavily there. It is called our Fair Shop campaign. The details are on our website if committee members wish to examine them. Basically, the Fair Shop campaign does what Deputy Calleary suggested, that is, it recognises and applauds employment that works with workers and the representative bodies in a proactive way to ensure the difficulties that we are all encountering as we travel through this recession are lessened to the greatest extent possible or as much as we can. We believe it is an important initiative. Even if we do not go beyond the trade union family, some 800,000 workers are still affiliated to trade unions on this island. It is the biggest civil society organisation on the island. We believe it is most important but it is important beyond that family as well.

The concepts of fairness and fair play should be inherent in us all. We should not do a bad turn to lose the chance of doing a good turn for anyone. The concept of Fair Shop is there and we are only too pleased to promote it. We have had local events and we plan to have more local events. This may be of interest to some of the Deputies and Senators in the committee. We had the national launch but we plan to have local launches of the Fair Shop concept and if any committee members are interested to know when and where they will take place, we would be pleased to let them know and invite them along.