Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for her contribution. I may be able to answer a few of her points but I will have to come back to her on others. As things stand, the grants and loans offered, including the restart grant, the wage subsidy scheme and the various loan schemes, are not tied to any particular environmental or social obligations. That may well be the case in the future. Down the line, we might decide not to bail out polluting industries, for example. For the moment, we have taken a blanket approach to try to support every job and every business rather than establishing mechanisms to discriminate between the jobs and businesses we want to save and those we do not. We have taken a blanket approach to date, which has been necessary given the blanket impact the pandemic has had on all sorts of businesses and employment.

With regard to the consideration of labour-intensive options for the July stimulus package, the Deputy has made a very valid point. For July, we need to consider Government investment in labour-intensive sectors in which we can get people back to work quickly. I agree that retrofitting, insulation and rewilding may be among those sectors. Even though construction activity has been under way for six weeks and we are told that 80% of sites are now open, 45,000 construction workers are still in receipt of the pandemic unemployment payment. There is something not right there. I do not know what it is but we need to dig down into that and get people back on site. We also need to provide alternative construction employment for those who cannot return to sites for various reasons. Retrofitting would certainly be top of the list of such alternative jobs.

With regard to Covid insurance, I am not sure whether the Deputy was asking whether employers are liable for people who get Covid on their premises or whether she was asking about business disruption insurance. All of these issues have yet to be sorted out in the courts. I am not of the view, however, that a business is liable for somebody contracting Covid on its premises unless it was somehow grossly negligent or responsible for it. To my knowledge, nobody has every successfully sued a business or crèche because they or their kid got chickenpox or the flu on its premises. I do not see why that would apply to Covid but stranger things have happened in the courts with regard to compensation claims.

The issue of business disruption insurance will play out with the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman and in the courts in the coming weeks and months. Some businesses are arguing that they should be paid for disruptions to business, while some insurers are saying that such claims are not covered. That will need to be teased out.

On co-operatives, I have visited many of them but I do not know much about their business model. I am not really au faitwith the competitive disadvantages they face that traditional companies do not. I am keen to find out more about the area and to learn a bit more about it. If there are ways to rebalance the system and the law in their favour to give them a fair crack of the whip, I am very much open to doing so.

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