Mr. Neil McDonnell:

I will not go into a long history of partnership, but when partnership originated back in the day, for whatever reason ISME was not involved. Then partnership effectively went by the wayside. Parties withdrew from it in the great recession and then it sort of restarted quietly under the Administration in the Thirty-second Dáil as the Labour Employer Economic Forum, but we are not members of that. This is not simply an issue of negotiating terms and conditions of employment and so on. We make specific reference to, for example, workplace health and safety, which have obviously troubled us since the start of the pandemic. I mean this as no criticism of the people who came up with the Work Safely Protocol 1 and 2, but they were very clearly drawn up with big businesses and big premises in mind and assigning a manager who would look after someone on the premises who was symptomatic, having an allocated room in which to put someone who was symptomatic, sending him or her home and making sure he or she did not use public transport. Quite frankly, we have people doing these protocols who have never worked in a corner shop, a café or a hairdressing shop. Those Work Safely Protocols would never have been generated as was had there been a small business involvement in it. Obviously, now, as we talk about other things such as those we have talked about today, for example, statutory sick pay, the living wage, the minimum wage and so on, these things are meaningless if the 99% of employers who make up the business demography in the country are ignored. ISME would say that unless LEEF somehow takes in the SME sector, it is just a group of people in the State sector and the multinational sector talking to each other.