Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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The Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael Noonan, has been speaking about looking at issues around the self-employed in the context of the budget. In fairness, I will certainly be having some conversations with him around this. We have discussed this issue on many occasions. It is crazy that self-employed people would not welcome a proposal to have a fairly cheap form of essential insurance in the event of somebody having an accident. Better-off self-employed people can afford quite expensive income protection insurance, but young guys in their 20s and 30s doing work such as roofing cannot afford it. All of us are very concerned about the incredible number of farm accidents there have been. With the hidden history in this area, we do not know what the insurance status of some people would be except that many of the fatalities - obviously, we have a social protection system - result in people getting survivors' benefits from widows, widowers and so on. The Deputy might have a better insight into exactly what the Minister, Deputy Michael Noonan, is planning to do.