Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for attending. I believe the whole situation is much more nuanced than some people might like to categorise it. From my own experience of listening to small businesses, we must remember that small business owners are workers as well, so it is not a simple black-and-white case of the poor workers and the mean employers. We have 250,000 small businesses in Ireland which, for the most part, treat their staff excellently and pay them well, and that is why they have survived and why many of them have managed to stay alive despite Covid. It is very important that we value and appreciate that. It is nuanced and we have to be careful how we oversimplify the challenges for both workers and employers, who are often workers themselves.

Probably the hardest work is in small companies. Both of my sisters are small employers and they both have about ten staff. They probably work 80 hours a week, probably harder and longer than any of their staff, who are absolutely brilliant and who they value a lot. It is very important that we make it clear that many small business owners treat their staff really well. That is why I want to hear how we can further support small businesses, and when I say that, I do not just mean the owners but their staff as well. I would like to hear more on what else we can do to support them and help them to survive, because it is such a huge area.

A previous speaker said that the sectors are not fully open. However, the agriculture sector is fully open, from my point of view down in Clare, although I do not know about Deputy O’Reilly’s area. As far as I am concerned, they are working 15-hour days when they get a chance to cut silage and so on. Many food growers have contacted me to say they cannot get the staff. Dr. Bambrick made the interesting point that they have been dependent on people from overseas but they are paying the minimum wage.

How will we solve this problem? People who cannot get staff are willing to pay any amount to get the job done. They need the food harvested because it is seasonal. They cannot wait until people come back from other countries. They are not trying to take shortcuts and not pay them properly. They will pay any amount at this stage to get people to help them with the harvest. How will we do that? There are some cases - do not shoot me down for saying it - of people staying on PUP when there are jobs available.

I have spoken to an Intreo office about this. As an example, a mushroom grower contacted me a couple of months ago, in Carlow or Kilkenny, and he could not get staff. Nobody applied for jobs yet there were 470 people in the same area on the live register or the PUP. I contacted the Intreo office and it clarified for me - if members want statistics and facts, not just a little anecdote - that there were more than 400 people on the PUP but none of them applied for the job. I am not saying that people have to come off the PUP because there is a job available picking mushrooms, but are we missing a piece to this? Employers are not allowed to engage directly with Intreo offices and I am not sure how we fit that piece into the jigsaw. I believe most people want to go back to work, but perhaps there is a missing piece or the way we link people who are on PUP or unemployment benefits with the businesses that want to pay them properly to go to work, even if it is only short-term. We cannot blame people for wanting only part-time workers if it is a seasonal thing. That does not mean that they only want part-time staff. It just means that they need more staff when crops are in season. I am curious to hear from Mr. McDonnell about that. What is the missing piece in this because pay is not an issue as they are paying above the minimum wage?