Mr. John McGrane:

We would certainly echo all of that. The issue is there is not a uniform deployment of the political and business strategy that was rightly envisaged and that has been very well crafted. It needs to be followed up with pretty tough inspection.

I acknowledge the point Deputy Bruton made on Central Bank numbers but I am not sure we are getting the traceability appropriate to this, given that the law was changed and, as Mr. Jennings said, there are a number of known judges who are adopting their own approach because the system still allows that to be done. We need rigorous tracing between cause and effect. The Oireachtas has done great work in this space but we need to see it come to fruition. That is about inspection, inspection, inspection.

The Deputy asked about auto-enrolment and other measures. We take his point that printing free money for energy bills cannot be a solution, even on a temporary basis. The link to supporting measures that reduce our dependency is right but we need the patient to still be alive by the time we get there. In that light, we talk about maximising the opportunity for the lights literally not to go out completely.

There are other costs that, this year not least, we have seen coming down the track. I had the privilege of serving on the Pensions Commission. Auto-enrolment is a measure we actively supported. Our view is that good employers will look to do the best they can anyway for their employees. Family businesses and other businesses will always do the right thing but there has to be affordability and sustainability.

There is a wider dimension to this theme. The socially important measures the Government has introduced this year, such as mandatory sick pay, auto-enrolment, the living wage and others are important national social commitments we are making. There is one legitimate question, which is whether all the financial cost of that should be taken by the people who make the jobs or whether it should be borne more widely by society, in terms of how we fund these things. Essentially, just like PRSI increases, these are taxes on a job. They get paid by the employer and add to the cost of the business, sometimes with a personal contribution, regardless of whether the employer can afford it or is profitable. It is worth standing back to consider how, if we want to maximise employment, we can make it easy, competitive and affordable for employers to create private sector jobs that sustain local economies. We would welcome a conversation at national level about where we want to go socially and how we afford that as a community.