Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent)

I congratulate the Taoiseach on delivering 1,000 jobs to Deputy Adams's constituency in County Louth. Jobs are a success story for the Government this week. I welcome that some of the privatisation money will go to job creation. We should congratulate the Taoiseach and the Government for achieving that and it is right that we should do so on both counts. However, I issue a little warning. Although the Taoiseach, the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Deputy Bruton, and the IDA have very successfully delivered jobs this week, I am very worried, as many Members should be, about another project which will lose jobs. This is the project, revived this week, whereby the State will pass the cost of statutory sick leave to small and medium-sized businesses. That is a serious transfer of a problem. It is a hospital pass in which the Government states that although it or the last Government created the problem of absenteeism it intends to give that problem to small and medium-sized businesses to solve. The result of this, as any small businessman under pressure will tell us, is that these businesses will be forced to lay off members of their staff because they cannot afford to pay for this. It is absolutely wrong that a small sector of society which is doing so much for the economy should be victimised in this way. The cost to the State of such lay-offs will negate any benefit which the Minister for Social Protection sees being made in social welfare payments. Will the Taoiseach assure the House there will be no transfer of this burden - a creation of the State - of the cost of sick leave to small businesses which are already so hard pressed and teetering on the brink?

See this speech in context