Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I wish to support my colleague, Senator White, on this amendment. We discussed it on Second Stage, as the Minister of State will be aware. and I know he took a particular view on it. However, we believe that it is vitally important. We are not at all convinced that the current representational nature of the proposed Low Pay Commission addresses convincingly the argument that has been put forward by Senator White. I am not sure whether anything can be done to change it at this stage but we certainly would like to press the view that one member of the commission should be a person who knows what it is like to run a business and to hire workers to manage a business particularly in the small and medium enterprise sector. I suggest one of the weaknesses of successive Administrations in this country, particularly in the modern era during the past 20 or 30 years, has been the lack of business expertise at Cabinet level, and I point to my own party in that regard as much as anything else. That is no reflection on the decent honourable committed people who took up public life, many of them at the expense of family and lifestyle, as was pointed out in an earlier debate by Senator Landy who spoke about the life of councillors. The lifestyle of a Deputy or a Minister when set against the modern norm is horrendous given the manner in which they are imposed upon on a 24-7 basis.

This argument in this respect that was made on Second Stage should again be made on Committee Stage. I would be interested to get the Minister of State's response to it not because I anticipate he will accept the amendment but I hope he will go beyond justifying the existing nominations on the basis that they have experience. Having considered them at the time, I am not in any way suggesting they are not capable of the task that they will be asked to perform. We believe that there should be an extra dimension to this commission and that extra dimension should be recognisable in acknowledging the small and medium sized sector, and that a business person with hands-on experience of business should be included among its membership.