Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Senator may be mistaking what is being provided for here. This provision is dealing with fixed payment notices and the penalty for such fixed payment notices. Essentially, they are minor offences and these are fixed charges that are issued without proceedings and they concern only limited offences. One is a requirement on the employer to consult with employees' representatives in respect of collective redundancies, another is to provide an employee with a payslip and a third is to provide a written statement of the hourly rate of pay. Penalties of this nature can be set by way of a fixed charge without a substantive case. It is a limited category and is not the broad category to which the Senator refers. Obviously, were one to opt for higher penalties in this regard, there would be a conflict between the fixed charge without a process, the seriousness of offences and the scale of the penalty. These are minor offences with minor charges, which are appropriate to a fixed notice procedure. I do not propose that the fixed notice procedure would apply in cases like failure to pay the minimum wage, which of course would be a criminal offence. There may be something of a misunderstanding in the Senator's amendment here. These are very limited cases for which I am providing in this regard and I do not believe the doubling of the penalty as suggested would be appropriate.