Olwyn Enright (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)

There are two strands to the question, how to deal with the persons who were self-employed who now find themselves in a position where they no longer have employment and then to look at the PRSI contributions to ensure that down the road more self-employed persons do not find themselves in this position because they paid only the class S rate.

To deal with the more immediate problem, no doubt the Minister, like myself and all our colleagues here, is dealing with this every day. There is a significant number of persons who were self-employed who suddenly find themselves with practically no entitlements on losing their jobs. The Minister has mused over the past two weeks in The Sunday Business Post on some of his views in this regard. He spoke of his new scheme, the employer job initiative scheme. I understand it is the one to which he referred in the articles, although it is not clear all of the time because we do not have the detail. The Minister seems to think that the skills among those fully qualified self-employed persons are most suited to this scheme. Can he explain how the scheme will work to particularly help that category of person?

See this speech in context