Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 5:

In page 7, to delete lines 25 to 33 and substitute the following: “(I) there will occur in the period from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2020 (in this subsection referred to as ‘the specified period’) such a percentage reduction as the Minister may specify in an order made by him or her under subsection (21)(b), in either the turnover of the employer’s business or in the customer orders being received by the employer by reference to the period from 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2019 (in this subsection referred to as ‘the corresponding period’), as would result in the same cost to the Exchequer as if the employment wage subsidy scheme were to be available to employers who sustained at least a 30 per cent reduction in either the turnover of the employer’s business or in the customer orders being received by the employer from 1 July 2020 to 31 December 2020 by reference to the period from 1 July 2019 to 31 December 2019, when that said cost is taken together with the cost of determining the said percentage and any additional administrative cost occasioned in determining the percentage, such that there shall be no additional cost to the Exchequer over and above that proposed in the Financial Provisions (Covid-19) (No. 2) Act 2020,”.

The amendment is rather convoluted and I apologise for that. The reason it is so convoluted is that we sought to submit an amendment that would not be ruled out of order. There are constitutional constraints on what Opposition or backbench Deputies can propose. We all must accept constitutional constraints on what we can do as individuals and on what institutions can do, but I believe debate in this House is more circumscribed than the constitutional constraints require. I hope that will be addressed in due course, but I do not propose to do so now.

I greatly welcome the fact that one no longer has to have been in employment at the end of February to benefit from the employment wage subsidy scheme. That is an advance. Many seasonal workers could not avail of the pandemic unemployment payment because they were not in employment at the end of February, and their employers could not avail of the temporary wage subsidy scheme if they subsequently employed them. This particularly affects the hospitality industry on the west coast of Ireland, and I presume it is the same on the south and much of the east coasts outside of our cities where the hospitality industry works probably 12 months of the year. Employers were unable to avail of the temporary wage subsidy scheme if they employed somebody whom they had employed last year and in the preceding two years because the person was not employed at the end of February. Now, they can employ the person and that is good news. However, under the conditions set out in the Bill their business must be down more than 30% in the second half of the year. I take issue with that in respect of employers who could not avail of the temporary wage subsidy scheme.

There will be employers who were able to avail of the temporary wage subsidy scheme and can now avail of the employment wage subsidy scheme. I congratulate the Minister on all that, and I congratulate the Government on the very difficult steps it took in March. I accept that something had to be done, and it had to be done quickly. The good is the enemy of the perfect. Some employers who were able to avail of the wage subsidy scheme will now go on to avail of the employment wage subsidy scheme, but there will be other employers who could not avail of the temporary wage subsidy scheme and who are now solely reliant on the employment wage subsidy scheme, and their losses from 1 July onwards will be looked at in determining whether they can avail of that scheme. They could have lost their entire income in the first half of the year. That would not be unusual for seasonal hospitality businesses throughout Ireland.

They were closed until the end of June, effectively. They lost the St. Patrick's Day weekend, Easter, including the Easter Monday bank holiday weekend, and the June bank holiday weekend, and how could I forget the May bank holiday weekend introduced by Ruairí Quinn? These people are therefore down substantially, yet if they earn more than 70% of what they earned last year, they will not be able to avail of the employment wage subsidy scheme. Notwithstanding the fact that they could not avail of the temporary wage subsidy scheme because their businesses were not open at the end of February, it seems unfair that now they will be judged only on their losses for the second half of the year, whereas employers who were in employment in hospitality industries which were open at the beginning of March were able to avail of the temporary wage subsidy scheme and can go on to avail of the employment wage subsidy scheme under exactly the same conditions. I raised, as did Deputy Danny Healy-Rae and many other Deputies, the unfairness of the predicament facing seasonal employers and seasonal workers at the time, and the Minister said, correctly, that the scheme was not perfect but that we had to do something and that this would be addressed in future. It is not being addressed. It is being addressed to the extent that people who were not in employment at the end of February can now be employed under the scheme but there is an unfairness in the treatment of employers in that only their losses in the second half of the year will be looked at. I ask the Minister to address this.

I apologise again for the fact that the wording of the amendment is convoluted. If the Minister were minded to accept it, he could exclude from its ambit, or at least its broadened ambit, employers who availed of the temporary wage subsidy scheme in order that only employers who could not avail of the temporary wage subsidy scheme would have their loss over the entire year looked at in calculating whether they qualified for the employment wage subsidy scheme. I cannot put it any clearer. The amendment is not meant to denigrate the efforts the Government made but merely to point out that there is an anomaly, a fact the Minister has accepted in the past. While a minor part of the anomaly is being addressed, what is not being addressed are the losses faced by hospitality employers the length and breadth of the country and the fact that they could not avail of the temporary wage subsidy scheme until now, whereas lots of other similar hospitality businesses that just happened to be open at the end of February could avail of it.

See this speech in context