Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I accept Ms King's position on that and I am in some ways in soft agreement with her. There is certainly no one-size-fits-all solution here. The problem with legislation such as this is that that is essentially what we are trying to craft.

Ms King referred to private employers earlier. She talked about the tightening labour market, and it is absolutely a tightening market out there. I was speaking last night to guys in the hospitality industry who want to extend their opening hours and they cannot do so because they cannot get the staff. That is the situation out there. There is flexibility for employees to look around for jobs. If a job entails the possibility of working from home, I think most employers, as long as they get productivity, will offer that. That raises the question of where exactly the problem is, which brings me back to what I said. Many public sector administration jobs can possibly be done through remote working. During the Covid pandemic, however, and other Members of the Oireachtas might agree with me on this, it has been difficult enough for us to do our jobs, trying to meet public servants and civil servants. That was made even more difficult because of Covid and remote working. It is very hard to know how productivity is being assessed when so many people are not on site, they are not meeting day-to-day and they are extracurricular, if you will. These issues need to be brought into this policy before we start enacting policy that will make it very difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises to deal with this legislation on top of everything else we are now putting on top of businesses, given the tightening business environment out there.