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

I thank the Deputy for her questions. As she knows, NPHET will meet today. It will formulate its advice after that meeting and a letter will be written to the Minister for Health. Once the Government has received advice from NPHET, it will consider it and make a decision on its implementation. As part of those considerations, we will have to make decisions regarding the pandemic unemployment payment, the employment wage subsidy scheme and other financial supports that businesses may need. It is prudent to see what the advice will be and how it will impact on people and businesses before deciding what our response will be in respect of financial support for workers and business. I do not want to pre-empt the outcome of that meeting, which has not even happened yet.

It is important to say the pandemic unemployment payment has given people vital income support throughout this pandemic. I was present the day it was invented, along with then Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection, Regina Doherty, and then Minister for Finance and Public Expenditure and Reform, Paschal Donohoe. I am glad we did it. It made a big difference and was very necessary. At peak, 650,000 people were in receipt of it; we are down to approximately 60,000 people now. If it is the case that people end up being laid off or are made redundant over the course of the next few weeks, and I am not saying that will happen, we will need to respond to that. It would not be fair to say to those people, some of whom are potentially being laid off for the second or third time, that all we have for them is the traditional jobseeker's payment. That is my view.

We have to give close consideration to what we may do about the employment wage subsidy scheme. It should be borne in mind that 2.4 million people are now at work in Ireland, which is close to more than ever before, believe it or not. Most business owners I encounter tell me they are struggling to find staff. That is the economic context in which we are now operating. Most of the companies that benefit from the wage subsidy scheme are not in the hospitality, arts and entertainment sectors. We have to bear that in mind too. It would appear that one of the difficulties with the employment wage subsidy scheme is that it cannot be broken down on a sectoral basis. We will get more information from the Revenue Commissioners on that.

It is important that anything we do is targeted at workers who may be affected and at businesses in the affected sectors. It should not necessarily be a cross-economy approach for sectors that may not need these financial supports anymore, which are ultimately very expensive and at cost to the taxpayer. The employment wage subsidy scheme, for example, costs €400 million a month, which is a huge amount of money. We need to make sure anything we do is targeted at the businesses and sectors that need support and not those that do not.

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