Micheál Martin (Cork South-Central, Fianna Fail)

Over the past three to four years, significant improvements were made to the minimum wage, workers' rights and sick leave pay. In 2022, for the first time, a statutory right was given to employer paid sick leave in the sick leave Act. The Deputy made the exaggerated comment that we are engaging in despicable action against workers. Sick leave has gone from three to five days. That was introduced in January 2024. The minimum wage has been increasing significantly over the past number of years as a result of Government decisions. It will continue to increase. To net out two issues, we decided to delay going from five to seven days and on the minimum wage, there is a delay in respect of matching the living wage. It will be a matter for Low Pay Commission to determine the increase. Those are the only two issues. The Deputy created a narrative around them that somehow there is an enormous undermining of workers' rights about to take place, which is not true.

The Deputy mentioned auto-enrolment.

Is he honestly saying that delaying auto-enrolment from September to January is a trampling of someone's rights? We spent years putting it together. The two main parties in government spent the past three to four years building up what was a very substantive programme in terms of getting auto-enrolment ready.

In the context of the logistics involved, the payroll providers and so on, the view was that it should start with the tax year in January as opposed to in September. That is all. Let us not pretend that this is some massive undermining of workers' rights or anything like that. I am a complete convert to the idea of auto-enrolment. Sorry, I am not a convert; I am a believer. I passionately believe in it, and 800,000 workers will benefit from it. We are going full steam ahead with it as a government. Probably the most significant thing we will do for workers in this generation is auto-enrolment. It has been talked about for 30-odd years, and we are going to do it.

The Deputy understands the context as well because he and his party fought the recent general election. Members on that side came into the House talking about the retail industry, which could not deal with the cumulative costs. Those involved blamed the Government. They had a point, because we did increase costs through improving rights for workers and other things. Many retail and many hospitality SMEs said that the cumulative impact of all of that was damaging both employment and their capacity to continue. We had people in this House talking about the closure of restaurants, etc.

It is always about striking a balance in terms of how fast we go with progressive improvements. We did bring in the pay-related jobseeker's benefit scheme, which is a significant improvement on anything that we had for the past two or three decades. That is a significant additional right for workers and is well deserved.

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