Mr. Shane Conneely:

We would go a step further and suggest the Government give it to the employees for them to use to develop their skills. One of the structural elements we must consider in the Irish market is there is a huge gender effect for women who leave the workforce. They primarily do so to look after children and then get caught up in being the carers within their broader family and never return to the paid workforce again. When they do, it is very often as part-time workers and there is a bit of an incentive mismatch between the activation of those people within the workforce and what their employers might want. We need to maximise the benefit of the existing skills base. Women my age are typically better educated than I am. We have an incredibly educated population, and women more so than ourselves as men. Therefore, the loss to the general economy from their disengagement from the workforce is very high. Employees should have a say in where they can do it. If we look at the part-time workforce, I think it is 80% women and half of those are there because we cannot facilitate their attending to caring duties. They are also vulnerable financially because any time you take out of that really affects them at the margin to skill up again. We suggest there needs to be an accompanying social protection element as well that can facilitate them if they are forced to take time out of the workforce in order to skill up as well.

As with the rest of the document, many of these policies need to be joined up. IBEC and ourselves agree with recommendation 11.2 that there needs to be co-ordinated action taken across Departments in order that these things happen in such a way that they are not all landing at once, or that supporting policies can reinforce each other.