Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I welcome the Minister. I am full of admiration for her grasp of her brief. Much of what she said was spoken off the cuff, rather than read from a script.

I now better understand her proposal about sick pay. That does not mean I support it because I was even more impressed by Senator Healy Eames's contribution. I understand that the Minister's objective is to reduce absenteeism. However, her figures will not be correct from the State's point of view if the payment is transferred to the employer. Where the employer is the State, there is a far higher number of sick leave days. That includes the Department of Health, the Department of Justice and Equality and the Department of Education and Skills. The State pays for it. In those Departments there is an average of 11 days sick leave per year compared to less than half that amount in the private sector. That will not change under what the Minister proposes; it will remain the same.

I understand the Minister's objective is to deal with absenteeism, but we need a more imaginative solution. I was impressed by the suggestion made by Senator Healy Eames. It would be quite dramatic but if we told every employee that the first three days of sick leave must be paid for by themselves, there would be a huge drop, particularly in the number of Monday absences where people decide not to bother going to work after a hard night or weekend. That affects large and small employers.

I am really concerned about the use of such a blunt instrument, as described by the Minister, particularly for a smaller business. Take the example of somebody employing five or six people in a restaurant. There is one chef and if he or she is out sick, there is nobody to replace them. The business probably closes until he or she returns. There is also the example of somebody who has five or six employees, one of whom is a lorry driver. There is no way they can transfer one of the others to drive that lorry. The proposal, while I understand its objective, must be more imaginative if it is going to succeed.

I prefer the question of how we can help people to come off benefits. I have looked at other countries and in Britain, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition Government introduced a work programme based on welfare reform similar to that introduced by President Clinton in the USA which is a payment for results contract with the private sector. More than 500 businesses and voluntary organisations in Britain have signed up to get people who have claimed unemployment benefit for up to a year back to work. The Government pays those contractors only when the worker has held down the job for a certain period. Chris Grayling is the Minister of State in the Department for Work and Pensions and he says it will transform the lives of millions of people and that it represents good value for the taxpayer as it bases payments to contractors on results, awarding much of the money to providers only when they find the jobseeker sustainable employment. Is the Government considering such a programme? It would be worthwhile considering it.

Businesses also complain that they do not have the right sort of people and that education provided by the State does not match business needs. In India, many leading firms have established in-house universities to teach the rudiments of their business and the Government there has asked industry to design one of the world's most ambitious attempts to close the skills gap. It has provided seed capital for an industry-led programme to train an incredible 150 million workers by 2022. We could do that here by attaching such a programme to the national skills development programme. We are a much smaller country but we should look at such models where the Government listens to the job creators. Jobs will be created by individual entrepreneurial businesses. They will not be created by the State. Jobs created by the State do not last in the long term and increase costs for those for those who could create jobs elsewhere. Start Up Britain, launched earlier this year, is trying to do the same as Start Up America. Edward Davey, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in the British Government, is preparing a comprehensive package of help for entrepreneurs that he calls "employment in a box" which he says will make it easy to take on the first employee in a new company. If we are not careful, we will not be able to encourage people to take on their first employee. Taking that first person is vital. If that works, the company can progress from there.

It is interesting to note the situation in other countries. Switzerland offers a good example for the child benefit system. Child benefit depends on the region where a person lives but it is usually around €150 per child per month, roughly the same as in Ireland. In Switzerland, however, in most regions child benefit is stopped for the third child and subsequent children. The United States has a similar system. In Ireland a parent with eight children will take home €1,322 per month, while in Switzerland a parent with eight children only gets €300 per month. It is not as if Switzerland cannot afford to pay similar child benefit to Ireland but the country has made the decision not to incentivise large families. I have five children so I am speaking against myself but given our financial situation, we must look at these areas.

I had a discussion with a secondary school teacher in a deprived area of Dublin who said many of his students are planning to have babies because of the benefits, housing and improved social status. It is easy to be facetious about this but these teenage girls are making a rational and economically sound decision and cannot be blamed for doing that. I am asking if benefits match.

Vouchers for food have negative connotations but we should consider every way to get the economy back on track. IBEC has proposed children's allowance be paid with an electronic card that can only be spent on goods here. It has been suggested that much of the money paid is not even spent in Ireland. I could be accused of coming from a tradition of encouraging people to spend their money in supermarkets but that is exactly where these cards should be used. Some of the money received in children's allowance payments is not necessarily being spent on children, the original idea for the payment. A certain number of well-off families use the money for holidays when at the very least the money should be spent in this country. IBEC's proposal has the dual benefit of solving what we want to do with children's allowance while giving a boost to the retail trade in Ireland. Perhaps vouchers could be linked to social welfare payments in the context of the reports that the Government is going to cut social welfare again at some point. Could food vouchers have a role in encouraging people to eat healthy food? Moody's Analytics in America has assessed different forms of stimulus and found that food stamps were the most effective, increasing economic activity by $1.73 for every $1 spent, with unemployment insurance coming in second at $1.62, whereas most tax cuts yielded far less than $1.

Those are just some suggestions. I am impressed by the Minister's grasp of her portfolio and the way in which she put across her ideas, but we must think seriously about some of these areas, particularly sick pay. We need something that is not such a blunt instrument.