Garret Ahearn (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the committee for the first time. I wish him well in his new role and look forward to working with him over the next two years hopefully. The point he made from the very start is to recognise that this is a minimum rate. Certainly from the people I know in Tipperary who work in the construction sector, an awful lot of them would be on a higher rate than this rate in particular. I am aware of the concerns that have been raised by other members here this morning on pay. I feel this is more of an issue in other sectors such as hospitality. In construction, certainly from my experience of speaking to workers, pay is quite good or very good. There are a number of factors for that obviously, one being the challenge of getting people into the sector at the moment. That can be seen from the number of people coming through on work permits to work in construction here. I certainly do not see that as an issue and I would appreciate the Minister of State's thoughts on that.

In the two and a half years he was in the role, our Taoiseach and former Minister of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, made an awful lot of changes to support workers' rights. I ask the Minister of State to touch on how he sees his role in following on from what was done in terms of workers' rights, whether it is sick pay legislation, a new public holiday, the right to disconnect, rights about redundancies for people who were laid off during the pandemic, or better protection rights for tips. I know some of those are not related to construction but they are related to workers' rights and pay and conditions, and that is in addition to changes that have been made to pay and tax thresholds. I would like to get the Minister of State's sense, over the next number of years in his role, of how he feels he can follow on from what the Taoiseach did while he was Minister.