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

That report was discussed at Cabinet yesterday, and was published today by the high level working group on collective bargaining. I thank the chairman, who will be in town for the IRN conference on Thursday, and members of the committee for the work they did. It is a complicated area. They had 11 or 12 meetings, engaged in huge deliberations and produced, which was quite an achievement for the group, a negotiated way forward that has both unions and IBEC on board. That is no small task and required much bravery from both sides to negotiate a potential way forward. The next step is consultation in the coming months. The timeline for implementation would require some major changes to our industrial relations law. A lot of that would be governed by how quickly the EU directive progresses. One reason we are doing this is that there is a new EU directive on minimum wages and collective bargaining. We do not need to do much on the minimum wage side because our system with the Low Pay Commission, which I appreciate was established by the Senator’s party, covers that. However, our laws are not adequate on the collective bargaining side so the timeline will be determined by that directive. We do not want to pass a national law and find it is not consistent with a European law.