Mr. Ger Gibbons:

I will take some of those questions and maybe Dr. McDonnell and Mr. Nugent might take the others.

On the question the Deputy asked about collective bargaining, yes, that is our experience. It is not just the unions that are saying it. I made reference earlier to a piece of work the OECD did back in 2019 on collective bargaining. We found that a very useful piece of work. It looked at collective bargaining in all OECD countries. Essentially, what it found is that where there are sectoral co-ordinated agreements, the outcome for the labour market is generally much better than just having companies negotiating individually with trade unions or not negotiating at all with trade unions, and that the experience of those countries like the Nordic countries, but also Austria and the Netherlands, is that they have higher employment rates, particularly for women, young workers and low-skilled workers than the countries that do not do that. The likes of the United States, Britain, Ireland were in the lower categories. In that piece of research, in relation to the issues the Deputy raised directly, what the OECD found is that where employers sit down with trade unions, issues are raised and there is conflict, but the conflict is resolved, and the issues are resolved. As a result, in general - I am just summarising very quickly here - retention rates are higher in the company, recruitment costs are lower for employers and, generally, the company operates more competitively and more productively. That is a very crude summary of what that piece of research found.

If I could just go back to one of the earlier comments that was made, if we look back on our recent history, at the start of the pandemic, one of the most successful things that was done was that the Government activated or utilised the mechanisms that were already in place, such as the Labour Employer Economic Forum, LEEF.

The measures agreed very quickly in March 2020 were taken through that forum. I refer also to the likes of the wage subsidy scheme, which was actually an initiative the trade union movement put forward in relation to Brexit. We thought that was a mechanism that could be used to support vulnerable but viable companies that were most at risk from a hard Brexit. It was not used at the time but it was the foundation for the mechanisms put in place six months later. I believe the Government would have ended up in that place anyway because that is what was done in other European countries. However, in our recent past there have been instances where issues could be resolved very quickly and effectively. When they had to be revised six months or a year later, they were. I will leave it at that.