Mr. Tim Fenn:

Our industry is open 24 hours per day for 365 days per year. There are a lot of hours involved in trying to run a hotel. Hotels also have huge variations in demand for services. By and large, in the industry we see a lot of full-time jobs that involve people on full-time contracts. We also have part-time jobs with people who are happy to take part-time jobs. We have people who take the seasonal jobs and there is a small coterie of people who are on flexible hours and these may be students. The federation spends a lot of time promoting human resources best practice. We also spend a lot of time working with the agencies to try to develop new apprenticeships, new traineeships and new ways of creating full-time employment for people who may start out in part-time positions. It is our job, not to seek to have 3,000 employees on our books, but to seek to minimise the number of employees and thereby give as many people as possible the full-time contracts the Deputy believes they should have, and which we also think they should have. I must be clear, however, that a huge amount of people have made lifestyle choices; they do not want to work the traditional nine-to-five hours five days per week. They are quite happy to work in different hours. Even today, as we looked at the new initiatives being put in place by the Revenue Commissioners around the PAYE structures, it is interesting that the Revenue figures show the amount of people - over 200,000 - in Ireland with more than one job.