Ms Gillian Harford:

I will put on record that I agree with the Deputy on maths. We struggle in Ireland in respect of data on private companies. Even that, as a first step, would be fantastic in terms of action.

On where modern organisations are at, we see employees struggling with the concept of work-life balance. In the modern world, the idea of clocking in, clocking out and then work stopping no longer applies. We see organisations starting to talk about work-life blend. If an organisation really wants to keep talent, particularly in the faster-growing sectors, we actively encourage it to be open to the idea that its employees have a life. If organisations want to encourage men and women equally into their workforces, especially into higher-value roles, they have to allow for a level of agility. We saw that probably the best thing to come out of Covid, if there ever was a best thing, was that overnight, organisations which had said they could never allow their employees to work in a more agile or remote way had no choice but to do so. That argument has already been made but that was just an argument about technology.

When we work with all our industry groups now, we say to them that agility is about giving employees more control over their day, their location and what needs to be done, whether they are in manufacturing or in an office role. While the requirements are different, if organisations do not understand that their employees have a life that is built as integral to work, then they will lose the talent and lose to their competitors. That is-----