Regina Doherty (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I find myself in the very unusual position of agreeing with Senator Gavan, even though we both know our ideologies are very different. I am a former Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection. This is a Government Bill and I very much support and welcome it, but I find myself recently being at odds with the Government over what is absent from the Bill. What we are attempting to offer people whose jobs we are taking away is an absolute disgrace. I totally understand, agree and concur that nobody should be fur farming any more, but those businesses need to be compensated. There is an arrangement in the legislation to do so but I believe, and we all know, that the timeframe of the past five years that will be stipulated in the regulations is a period where those businesses have not done particularly well. That will reduce the compensation to those people and restrict their ability to reinvent themselves.

What absolutely jars, however, is the fact that the State, which is doing these people out of their jobs, is offering them a miserable two weeks' redundancy per week for the years they have served the State in a business we have decided we longer require. To be also fair, and I will speak to amendment No. 6 in section 7, it is fundamental that we invoke a special fund within the SOLAS organisations to make sure we retrain and reskill those people.