Garret Ahearn (Fine Gael)
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I have two quick questions on that. Mr. Mulligan spoke about remote hubs and the amount of money that is being put into them. Does he think it needs to be ramped up even more? Where I live in Tipperary, we have two excellent remote hub areas. However, the demand is increasing week on week and month on month. To manage that for companies looking to facilitate remote working, whether it is not at home in rural areas where I live where we might not have good broadband, but they want to do it in towns such as Cahir, Tipperary town and Carrick-on-Suir, do we need to ramp it up more?

Mr. Mulligan said there is a six-month period before someone can request remote working because there needs to be a relationship between the employer and the employee built up. However, over the past two years, we have had an awful lot of people who have started a career with a company in remote working from the very start. The employees and employer have not seen each other very much.

Does Mr. Mulligan have information or statistics on how that has worked from the employer's perspective? He said there needs to be a six-month period for that relationship to develop. Does that mean that over the past two years that has been a challenge for employers or not? It seems to me that part of the interview process at this stage will nearly be an offer of remote working as part of someone taking a role. It would certainly be a conversation. I can understand why there is a six-month period talked about but, practically, I do not see the logic in it because the opposite has been happening over the past two years. I am interested in Mr. Mulligan's view on that.