Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank our witnesses for giving their time and making their submissions to us. I have a couple of questions and I hope to get in on the second round to divert slightly from this topic and to have a quick chat with Mr. Berney about the aviation sector, but I will stick to the kernel of the submissions for the moment.

I will address Mr. McDonnell in the first instance. He gives links or provides what he says is evidence - anecdotal evidence - relating to people not returning to work. As Dr. Bambrick demonstrated last year, however, 400,000 people voluntarily gave up their PUP claims and returned to work, so all the evidence suggests that the opposite is the case. I refer Mr. McDonnell to a tweet from Mr. Pat Phelan of the SISU clinic. This is backed by Michael Harty of Home Care Direct. Mr. Phelan tweeted:

Sick to my back teeth of hearing it's hard to get staff

It's absolutely not

It's hard to get cheap staff

Hired 10 people in last 10 weeks not a problem.

Free private Healthcare, free contributory pension

Zero issues

Pay your teams

I will not continue reading out the tweet, but Mr. Phelan basically said that decent pay and good, fair conditions mean that it is actually not a problem to hire staff. Would Mr. McDonnell have any comment to make on that? As I said, all the available evidence presented by Dr. Bambrick this morning and by business people suggests that there is not an issue. The Department of Social Protection does not have a huge number of people complaining about it. To me it seems very simple: you pay your workers well and treat them decently and you will not have the problem that Mr. McDonnell claims is there but for which the only evidence is anecdotal at this stage. Mr. McDonnell might care to respond to what Mr. Phelan said about the treatment of workers.