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

Let us see if they cannot get staff. We are in a very different place now than we were when we did the reopening last summer. I remember hearing last summer lots of anecdotal evidence from employers saying they could not get people back to work because the difference in what they were getting from the pandemic unemployment payment and what they would get for working 30 or 40 hours a week. Essentially, it would not be enough to encourage them to come back to work. In the end, however, I did not see very many shops or restaurants that could not reopen.

I am not actually convinced yet that people will not go back to work. We are seeing the number of people on the pandemic unemployment payment falling fast. This needs to be assessed in a few weeks' time. There will always be a small number of people who, for whatever reason, do not accept their job back. I think, however, the majority will. It is probably too soon to come to any conclusions about that yet. Let us see where we stand in terms of the numbers on the pandemic unemployment payment in July and August. We will have a better read then. We could be down to maybe 100,000 people. That is a better base from which to understand this.