Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The agenda has not been full of new restrictions on employment in recent times. It is not that Europe is seeking to impose many new obligations on employers. The thrust in Europe recently has been not to undermine workers' rights but to reduce regulation in areas where it is unnecessary. Obviously areas such as the posting of workers overseas was one where there was a perception, and a reality, that people's rights were being abused and there was no enforcement mechanism to deal with it. That is the reason for the debate about enforcement for posted workers overseas. To my knowledge, there has not been a welter of new regulations being imposed on member states. There were in the past, such as the working time directive which governs certain provisions and so forth, but one cannot say that in the midst of this crisis Europe is seeking to make it harder to employ people. There is no evidence that country-specific recommendations or directives are going in that direction. Arguably, it is in the other direction whereby they are increasingly focusing on how good the state's training and activation systems are, what it is doing about young people who are out of school for a long period, and how it is picking them up and bringing them back. That is the focus of European interest, rather than dreaming up new sets of restrictions.

There are the general matters such as employment equality, consultation, health and safety, mobility or the right to move and the temporary agency workers, on which we had legislation this year. Those are the types of areas Europe has generally regulated, but the only one on which there was legislation was with regard to temporary agency workers. Again, that was an area in which there was evidence of widespread abuse, so there was a directive to deal with that abuse.