Colm Brophy (Dublin South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

To follow up on the point made by the Minister of State, it is very important that consideration is given, particularly to small businesses in terms of the impact of a change of this nature on them. This is a crucial consideration as far as I am concerned. There is a time factor in that businesses need to gear up for any type of change. There is also an impact. Before being elected to the House I had 20 years of being in business and there is no such thing as something that is free and has no real cost. Everything has an impact on businesses, particularly businesses that run on very tight margins, which is the case for a lot of the small employers in Ireland, who have one or two employees.

In the absence of a consultation process for those people or their representative groups, it is vital that we take time on this to ensure we get the balance right between the aims of the Bill, of which I am very supportive in general and which are to facilitate work-life balance and increasing leave overall, and the impact it will have, particularly on small businesses. Big multinational corporations can handle things like this in their sleep. It is when we get down to somebody running the local shop, running the local hairdressers, somebody in a village running the pub or somebody running a small manufacturing business that we need to recognise there are two things we need to consider, which are the work-life balance of people working and the impact on the industry and business in question.