Fidelma Healy Eames (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Kelleher, who I have not met previously. I certainly welcome the fact that he stayed for the entire debate and I look forward to hearing him sum up.

I chose to speak on the challenges and opportunities to the Irish labour market in a globalised economy because, like many of my constituents in Galway from whom I receive constant feedback, I have been concerned about our over-reliance to date on the construction industry and what has really been a one-horse economy. It is clear that we live in changing, vulnerable and uncertain economic times.

Last week Deputy Leo Varadkar, who is the Fine Gael spokesperson on enterprise and trade, and I held a think-in in Galway among the business community. There were people from small businesses, Enterprise Ireland and the enterprise boards, that is, representatives of State agencies as well as people running their own businesses. Some of the feedback I am sharing with the Minister of State came from that session.

The main finding was that there are two main tasks we need to do in the Irish labour market to be able to compete in what is now a globalised economy. First, we need to encourage more people to be new employers, preferably indigenous, and second, we need to mind and support the current employers. Employers, after all, are our multipliers. They are our economic generators. We depend on a thriving economy and on the value, money and revenues that come from that to fund the health and education systems. Our economy is the driver for social gain.

On the issue of how we can create an environment to create more employers, we first need to find real and creative ways to help employers make, rather than take, a job. To do so, there should be no employers' PRSI in the first five years of new business start-ups. I say this following much feedback from business and constituents but also having myself been an employer. Employers' PRSI is a tax on being an employer, the very person we need to encourage and help, not penalise, in the early days. The employer will keep young people and jobs at home and will keep the economy going.

As a start-up employer, I found having to pay employers' PRSI a major turn-off. It is a tax for which there is no obvious credit and from which one would not necessarily get credit from one's employees. It was much more appealing for me in that case to have my people work as self-employed contractors, but that was not always possible.

One must look at how the State encourages and supports employers. It is ironic that the first agent of the State a new employer hears from is the Revenue, which informs the person of his or her VAT, PAYE and PRSI responsibilities. This is not the way to stimulate business excitement and hope. Equally, start-up business should hear from Government agencies offering help and encouragement, for example, in the form of mentor programmes where there is the so-called much experienced buddy helping the start-up buddy in business. In a way this is a form of real education practice on the job. The one point I will make about business people is that they live, not always in the theoretical world but in the real world. Any practice such as mentoring that can help them in their day-to-day jobs often has far more value for them.

Let us consider the type of individual an employer is. They are largely risk takers, imaginative, creative, with a goal oriented, can-do attitude. The threat of bills, excessive regulation and fear of breaking the law through regulation can curb this spirit in the early, start-up days of a business and, according to business people, leads to worrying times and has a negative impact on them. The last thing we want to do is stifle this creativity which is the lifeblood of business ideas.

One of the strongest recommendations that came from that Galway think-in of which I spoke was the urgent need for the Minister, Deputy Martin, to implement the recommendations of the forum on small businesses. He is slow to implement them. One of the main recommendations of this report is the need to take away some of the excessive regulation stifling start-up business.

It appears that the days of foreign direct investment are gone due to the high cost of doing business in this country.