Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister and certainly echo those sentiments. I am interested in the sort of data we are collecting and collating at the moment and how we are going to apply the data. I have seen some statistics from the Office for National Statistics in the UK and they are really grim. They concern the occupations with the highest death rates linked to Covid-19 and, as one would imagine, the lower income workers in low-skilled, elementary occupations such as care and leisure and other services, and process, plant and machine operatives, are most impacted by the Covid crisis. When we are talking about extending the payments or even removing payments, do we have similar data on the type of employees who are being impacted by the Covid-19 epidemic? Can we use this to target particular employees? Once the Covid payment stops, maybe we can pick particular employment groups or employees to whom we can extend the payment. I am thinking of retail workers. When we are opening up our retail sector, for example, if we have clusters a couple of months from now and somebody loses their employment because they have to withdraw themselves, they should not have to go back onto the €203 which we have already accepted is not enough to live on. Are we collating data and can we better use it to target employees?

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