Mr. Liam Kelly:

I will take the latter point first. The protected disclosure to which the Deputy refers was made a matter of weeks after the establishment of the WRC and referred, I think, primarily to the work carried out by inspectors during the period of NERA. It was made to the Department and the Department assigned an independent investigator to carry out an investigation. My understanding is the result of investigation - we were not shown a copy, for the reasons I will outline - was there was no systemic wrongdoing in the work of the inspectorate and as such, no issues for us to deal with. I do not know if that answers that particular point.

On the number of inspectors, there is no labour inspectorate or regulator in the world which would say it had enough inspectors to carry out inspections. In the end, there are two ways to drive compliance. One is through outreach campaigns, because it is not possible in any circumstance to visit every employment in any given year or any number of years due to the sheer volume of employments. Thus it is really key we have a very good and up-to-date outreach campaign along the lines of some of the issues we have discussed today.

In the early part of this year we established internally a communications unit to help us work on the outreach that the information customer service does. We will get better and will hone it so that it is more effective. It has to be sustained and supplemented by inspectors. We have engaged with the Department over the past while about increasing the number of inspectors. As I mentioned, we received additional funding for ten inspectors, which is an 18% increase in our overall number of inspectors. We will assimilate them over the next six to seven months and will train and on-board them. At some time towards the middle of next year, we have agreed with the Department that we will return to this discussion to see if that can be moved forward in subsequent years. It is no secret that we are working to build up our total inspectorate numbers.