Ms Dara Breathnach:

I thank the Senator for her questions. The scheme cannot be launched until the legislation has made its way through the Houses of the Oireachtas. That is the earliest constraint but our colleagues in the Department of Social Protection also need to set up the necessary application system. That involves the development of a significant piece of information technology with a platform that will be familiar to employers. That is why it is largely intended to be an employer-led application process where employers have had to make people redundant over the course of the pandemic or where they will have to make them redundant in the coming years. That will be part of that termination process. It is expected the system will be online and available in the first half of next year. We hope it will be on the early side of that first half of next year but we cannot give a commitment on that at this stage.

The administration of the payment is not intended or expected to be a very long process. The Department of Social Protection is very experienced in delivering schemes comparable to this one, for example, in situations where it is funding redundancy payments because of an employer’s inability to pay. There may well be some crossover in this case as well, with employers having to let people go and they might end up having the redundancy payments on the Social Insurance Fund, as already happens under law when the employer cannot pay, and having this additional payment as well. That addresses the Senator's first two questions.

Her final question was on the circumstances in which an employee would have to make the application. That is very much a case where the employee's former employer simply will not engage and refuses to make the application on the employee's behalf. We very much hope that would happen in only a very small minority of cases. Many employers will still want to maintain some form of goodwill with those former staff members. This will not involve any skin off the employer's nose because the employer is not liable for the payment. There is no debt raised against the employer when the payment is made to the employee.