Derek McDowell (Labour)

Perhaps I have unwittingly wandered into an area which is more interesting than I thought it was. I would have thought it was best practice to deal with employees at workplace level. For example, the staff working in factory A, located in Dublin, should get information relevant to them and this should be dealt with by their employers in their place of work, whether the factory is owned by the same company that owns factory B, which is located in Cork. In other words, the workplace is optimal. The Minister of State seems to suggest that employees should be dealt with in the context of the whole company, which may own factories all over the country. To use the European terminology, a bit of subsidiarity would have done no harm.