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

Following up on the Deputy's initial comments, I will as officials to follow up on that issue and we will interrogate it. With regard to other health and safety matters, it is possible that other health and safety breaches went undetected and uninspected because of the focus on Covid-19. At the same time, though, I would hope that part of the experience of the pandemic and Covid-19 has helped to raise that bar in respect of health and safety in the workplace. It made people much more aware of respiratory etiquette, hand washing, the need for hygiene and cleaning, the benefits of separating people out and not crowding them into a workplace and the benefits of good air quality. It could be that one of the positive legacies of the pandemic is a higher bar and greater awareness of health and safety in the workplace more generally.

Programme C does not get less money because it is less important. The programme on regulation gets less money because what is done in programmes A and B is very expensive. They relate to capital grants, by and large, for constructing buildings and helping to build plants and factories and so on. That is obviously much more expensive than regulation, which is mainly down to salaries. There has been a very considerable increase in resources for all the regulatory agencies in the past couple of years. That goes for the WRC, HSA, ODCE and National Standards Authority of Ireland, NSAI, as well. We would anticipate seeing resources and budgets for those agencies continuing to rise.