Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Tánaiste for his time and his work to date. Great supports have been provided, in fairness. My son, who is a student, had a part-time job and he benefited from the PUP which kept him sane. I thank the Tánaiste for the work on the PUP, which was put in place pretty quickly, so well done.

On Facebook, I have received letters from various people. I had meetings with members of Foxglove and we raised the issue in the committee. Given that Facebook does not directly employ these moderators, surely there is an onus on the recruitment agency, the company that employs them, and it should be put under pressure to provide proper services and reports for its employees. Is that something we can look at? There is a loophole for Facebook because if it is not directly employing these staff, it is not directly responsible for them. What are their official employers, the agencies that recruit them, doing to support these young people and their mental health? These are young people because there are no old people in these jobs. I am too old to get a job as a moderator. We will let down our young people if we do not get proper structures and supports in place for these content moderators. Prevention is better than a cure. All members feel very strongly about this issue. I will not go on about it; I just wanted to make the point about the middleman.

On local enterprise offices, LEOs, there are more than 248,000 small businesses in Ireland with fewer than ten employees. That is a huge number of jobs and they are the heart and soul in much of the country. These companies are often much more reliable than the bigger guys who might let us down by leaving and setting up in other countries, as happened yesterday. Small businesses are often high quality family companies that take good care of staff. We should support them more. The LEOs have done amazing work throughout the pandemic to keep small businesses afloat. They are under serious pressure, however, and it is clear from my meetings with them that they would love to have extra staff and supports.

On food producers, we are importing a lot of food that we could produce here. For example, potatoes and garlic are coming from China, Israel and England. We have a lot of great land that should be used more for growing food, not only mass producing beef and dairy. We should strengthen our labelling for food production. Under the current system, a company can import anything it likes, do something small with it, wrap it up and make it look as though it was made in Ireland. We need to have stronger labelling for food made in Ireland. I am aware of this from my sister's business which produces cheese.

If we strengthened labelling, we would strengthen Irish food producing companies. Also, because of the climate emergency, carbon footprint and all of those things, there has never been a better time to have a huge push to buy Irish. Back in the 1980s there was a great buy Irish campaign and it is time to have another one. I say to the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment that a good buy Irish campaign on social media and national media might not be the worst spending that we could do.

I cannot emphasise how important Shannon Airport is to the entire region. The 120 jobs that were lost yesterday are devastating for the families affected. A lot of those workers have been loyal to Aer Lingus for a long time and it is disappointing to see the lack of loyalty that has been displayed by Aer Lingus to Cork, Shannon or to their staff. More important is the ripple effect the airport has on a huge region through the generation of many thousands of jobs in the tourism sector. It is well known that 95% of the people who fly into Dublin go somewhere else and do not spend their money here. However, the people who come into Shannon and Cork are the people who stay and spend money here. They keep businesses open and keep people living in rural regions. If we are serious about regional rebalance I urge the Tánaiste, the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Transport, Deputy Eamon Ryan, to sit around a table because they really need to see how important the Shannon and Cork airports are to a huge area of this country. We cannot talk about extending runways in Dublin while there are no flights coming out of Shannon Airport. We need those flights to England to connect us with the rest of the world and I cannot emphasise enough how important that is. They are essential for our mental health in the region, as well as our economic health and it is important that we are given hope. I believe that the Taoiseach is meeting some people but the four Ministers need to get their thinking caps on and decide what to do specifically for Shannon Airport as it has zero flights at the moment. We need Shannon Airport to resume flights and thrive again. When people come to Ireland, the east coast is great but the west has the Wild Atlantic Way and the most visited spots in Ireland such as the Cliffs of Moher and Adare. The region is massive and, therefore, it is important that the four Ministers I mentioned have an emergency meeting.