Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Senator is absolutely right about the content moderators. Whoever the employer is they have a duty of care whether it is Covalen, Facebook or anyone else. Under the Protection of Employees (Temporary Agency Work) Act 2012, if one is taking on agency workers, one has to give them the same protections as the people who are directly employed by one. The same basic working conditions certainly apply.

On the LEOs, again I very much agree. We are scaling them up. We are staffing them up. They have an extra €5 million in their budget this year and we have extended their remit. They are now responsible for everything ranging from flood relief to businesses to all the new schemes that we have set up. I do want to keep scaling them up over the next couple of years but I want to do so in a way that is manageable. Sometimes one can scale up an agency or public body too quickly, ask them to do too much too soon and then things fall over. So I want to be able to scale up but to do it right.

On the labelling, I am a big fan of Tola cheese, as the Senator knows, and I hope that company is going well. As labelling is an EU matter under the Single Market, we do not have full control over how things are labelled and how they are not but we have input into the EU. There are things that producers can do voluntarily but in terms of what the law is around labelling that is a Single Market issue and it is done at a European level. It is something, however, in which I certainly have an interest as trade Minister.

Finally on Shannon, as the Senator will be aware, the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, is going to meet Aer Lingus today. He is going to ask them to defer their decision to close the cabin crew base at least until Aer Lingus sees the Government's plan for aviation, which will be out next week. What the company is saying, and said in its letter to me on the redundancies, is that it is not just about the pandemic and the travel restrictions. The airline is also saying that the base has been inefficient for quite some time even before the pandemic. I think that needs to be explored with it because we would like to see the decision deferred. If the decision goes ahead, we are going to want to talk to airlines about how we can incentivise them to return. Airlines are very nimble and bases that are closed one month can often be re-opened the next year and we have seen that particularly with Ryanair. I know that when I was the Minister responsible for tourism - long, long ago - removing the travel tax really helped to get new routes into the country and frequency scaled up. The travel tax is now gone but we are going to examine what incentives we can put in place to encourage airlines to return and routes to return. The Ministers, Deputies Donohue and Eamon Ryan, and I actually spoke about that yesterday just after the Cabinet meeting. We have started that initial discussion already but all those things will only work when people are allowed to fly and that is the bottom line.