Ms Maeve McElwee:

I will make a comment on the stand-alone fund. I know that it has been proposed previously. One of the questions we would have asked about how that would operate is who would pay into the fund. Is the proposal that employers that have collective agreements and that have committed to ex-gratiapayments would fund that, or is it funded by all employers? In the latter case we have the constitutional issue of employers that have not negotiated collective agreements or do not negotiate collectively at all. Then there are also perverse incentives in that if you are contributing to the fund, perhaps you also agree the largest ex-gratiapayment in order that you get the greatest benefit in the event that you have redundancies that have to be negotiated and that ex-gratiapayment has now become statutory. Aside from all that, the largest challenge is still how to put a voluntary agreement on a statutory footing.