Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will begin by welcoming what the Minister intends to achieve with this Bill, which is to continue to provide support for people as the economy reopens and to provide an injection of economic stimulus. I also will begin by saying that the Bill is a missed opportunity and demonstrates a lack of connectedness with the real economy, at least, the economy I come from and the area that I represent.

New Deputies are frequently told to watch out for the Leinster House bubble because sometimes what goes on there is little connected with the real world. We are not in Leinster House now and we are not in a Leinster House bubble. To me, however, this Dáil looks increasingly like a bunch of rare orchids in the National Botanic Gardens protected from the realities of where they live.

In a couple of months' time, we are going to ask pupils and teachers to go back into schools, and rightly so. Our children deserve an education. We are going to ask our medics, doctors and nurses, to go back into overcrowded hospitals and provide a health service, not just a Covid-19 health service, but a general health service, and rightly so. We deserve as a nation, like every other nation in Europe, a functioning health system. Somehow, however, we are different.

4 o’clock

We are wearing masks, I believe, as a statement. The Minister for Finance should look around this auditorium now. This is costing hundreds of thousands of euro. Is this value for money or is it an example to ordinary working people whom we are telling to get on with their lives because we have to live with this virus? We have no choice; we must move forward and get on with our lives.

I want to focus on the temporary wage subsidy scheme. The Minister and I discussed this in Leinster House when he was a Minister in the previous Government. We agreed that it was not perfect and needed to be tweaked, but that those tweaks would be carried out. In particular, seasonal workers in seasonal businesses could not avail of the temporary wage subsidy scheme because those employees were not in employment at the end of February. I welcome that the scheme is being tweaked to allow for people returning from maternity leave and other forms of leave to go back to work. Irrespective of whether the Government had tweaked it, that would have happened because they would have won a discrimination case against the Government.

However, there is still nothing for seasonal workers going back to work.

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