Derek McDowell (Labour)

While it is appropriate to say there has been a significant improvement in the Bill before the House, it by no means does all that Congress has been looking for over a number of years, and Senator O'Toole knows that better than most. Even in terms of the timescale, my current party leader, as our party's then spokesperson on enterprise and employment, dealt with this issue over a number of years with the Tánaiste in the other House. It is over a year since the redundancy review group was set up by the Tánaiste. It was set up in April of last year and reported in October last. It will have taken over a year to get it on the Statute Book and a significant number of groups of workers will have lost out by virtue of that fact. I will deal with that aspect later.

The redundancy review group, which the Tánaiste set up largely as a delaying mechanism before the election, did not reach agreement on many key issues. It reached agreement on a number of issues. I am reading from the press release the Tánaiste issued which states that agreement was reached in terms of non-reckonable service, service abroad, which I welcome, computerising the system, which everybody would welcome, the number of forms used and the upper age limit. It did not reach agreement at that stage, and this is the important point, on the amount of the payments to be made, the refund that will be made to employers at a later stage and a number of other important matters.

On the amount of the payment, it had become ludicrous and risible that workers under the age of 41 got half of one week's payment per year of service. Nobody could stand over that and we have been aware for many years that that needed to be revised. It is now two years of service, irrespective of age. That is a four-fold improvement for those under the age of 41 and a two-fold improvement for those over 41 years of age. The fact remains, nonetheless, that it is dwarfed by severance arrangements typically made by companies in reasonably good financial standing and dwarfed more spectacularly by the arrangements made in recent years by semi-State companies, many of which have gone to six or eight weeks' payments for years of service. Some of those arrangements made by semi-State bodies were excessive. The important point about a redundancy payment is that it is intended to tide people over while they are between jobs and to give them a lump sum, particularly in later years, with which they might be able to set up in private employment in terms of giving them the seed capital to establish an enterprise.