Mary White (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I set up a business to increase employment, and I am not ashamed to say I never heard of profit. My drive was to create employment. I do not believe our country will go anywhere if we have an extreme position of cynicism. We are talking here today about small and medium-sized Irish companies. That is the reality, and we must face facts. I do not know anybody who wants to be ruthless and exploit another person, because that person would not work if he or she felt exploited.

If they felt they were being exploited, they would not put their heart and soul into the business. It is good to protect people but the problem originally was that the minimum wage kept going up every year. It is no harm for our colleagues to know that in 2000, wages in Germany were exactly the same as our wages but our wages went up over the past five or six years so we lost competitiveness. A learning process is needed to understand what business is like. We need private enterprise and being self-employed is not 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. It is 24-7. One cannot just look at one's watch and say "I'm getting out the door and going home." One must be on the job all the time. From my experience and that of other employers, it is a team composed of owners and their workers.