Ms Maeve McElwee:

I have two points. I apologise to Deputy Shanahan because this was not his question but, on the equality space, an assertion was made that a four-day working week will rebalance many of the gender challenges we find in the workplace. I would argue the issue is much more complex than that. Even as we look at what has happened over the course of the pandemic with, in many cases, both parents at home and children being minded, managed and schooled at home, we did not see a rebalancing of the burden between both parents as a result of them having equal access to the responsibilities and chores in the household.

We absolutely know that burden fell much more heavily on women. We would really need to think about how we would be structuring our society in a four-day work week to ensure we are doing many different things to rebalance that relationship as opposed to just allowing more women to work four days a week and have a better quality of life from that perspective.

The other points that are important and which were raised by the Deputy Shanahan concern where we want to attract workers to. Obviously, for private sector firms this is a competitive piece, but from an IBEC perspective, looking at it from our wider economy and a sustainable environment, we have to think about where the jobs are going to be in the future. We have already indicated that many of them will be in the caring sectors. Those are not jobs where we can streamline or have efficiencies or choose to work Mondays or Fridays. Care is required and happens in a particular timeframe. For example, I cannot serve breakfast in a hospital at 9 p.m. on a Thursday evening to avoid coming in on Friday morning. The reality is we will have to have people there and that is a cost. It is a huge taxpayer cost. We need to think about how that then flows through into the wider economy. Based on our current demographics and the flows of labour, given we already have very considerable labour shortages in this area, we must consider whether we are going to be able to meet those needs. Are we simply going to end up in a situation where it is so expensive to provide that care, we find people withdrawing from the labour market - more often, women - because it is not cost effective by the time they have paid for childcare and transport to get to work based on the salary and tax they pay? That is not to say we should not do it, but the point I am trying to make is we need to undertake a very strong regulatory assessment and take a careful look at both our labour market objectives and the economic costs, particularly as our population is ageing and our demographics are changing considerably, like many other European countries.