Ms Maeve McElwee:

I wish to address Deputy Bruton’s point. When we look at this issue of assets and retained assets, while Debenhams has given rise to some of this conversation today, we are actually legislating for other events that will happen in due course. It will not always be the case that there may be assets left behind. While it will not necessarily be the State that will pick up the cost, in many cases, it will be and what is being suggested here is that the State would also pick up the cost for agreements to which it has not been a party to negotiating, in which case it is very difficult to see how the State could actually be bound to take up that statutory obligation. To be fair to the Minister of State, Deputy English, this has been subject to a significant amount of discussion, consultation and engagement, the reason being it is enormously complex and highly challenging. We have not had a whole lot of outcome on the basis that he is trying to balance the complexity, that is, the fairness in terms of the State obligation and the obligation to the taxpayer and protecting the employees from the perspective of not creating different classes of employees fairly and without undue potential for there to be unintended consequences.

That is the real concern in this regard. We are looking situations coming forward and that will continue to be the case for many years ahead. We will have redundancies and there will always be businesses that go into liquidation. It is something we need to think very carefully about. I am not aware of any other precedents. We will obviously look into it and come back to the Deputy. However, the likelihood is it is the complexity of this that makes it so challenging.