Paddy Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I welcome the opportunity to speak on this very important legislation. It is a very short Bill and I am delighted that the Minister has brought it forward. It gives certainty to people who were laid off or are going to be laid off up to 2025 in some cases. It provides for their statutory redundancy. In the overall context, in my view it still does not address the whole issue of redundancy, in particular for self-employed people and sole traders. I have repeatedly made this point in this House. I have drafted a Private Members' Bill which I will bring forward in the next couple of weeks. A highly unfair imposition is put on self-employed people and sole traders who employ people and who start out employing people in the greatest of faith. They are fully committed to their businesses and for some reason or other the business may fail, close down or they may want to retire. There is no system whereby the employer can make provision for a business that may fail or close. At the end of the day when the business closes, the employer has to find two weeks' pay per year for the staff members who were employed for maybe ten or 20 years, I think there is a limit on the number of years that can be counted. If the employer cannot pay it, of course the State will pay but eventually the State will come after the employer. That means that a charge can be put on the family home. The Bill that I am bringing forward will be to eliminate the risk to the family home from statutory redundancy, in particular in the case of self-employed people and sole traders who are employing a small number of people and who do not have the same protection as companies that are protected.

In the long run, the Government must find some system where this is paid. It is only right that employees would be paid and paid properly and so on but some provision has to be made. At the end of the day, somebody who employs people for 20 or 30 years can have a charge put on the family home. There could well be a dependent child in the house for whom the family would like to make provision for when they die but the charge is put on the family home.They have employed people, paid their taxes, paid for the Civil Service and so on. It is an awful imposition to put on people who do not have the protection of a company. They start up a business in good faith and hope that it will grow and grow. They never contemplate a day when their business will fail, but businesses do fail in lots of cases. Indeed, in this particular climate, there will be many businesses that will fail. There will be businesspeople between now and 2025 who will have no choice but to give up, who will determine that they cannot continue because they are getting too old, that the business is not making money or that it is no longer viable. Those people, unless they have the protection of a company, will have no choice but to make redundancy payments to their staff. Under this Bill, the Government is making provision for a number of years.

I ask the Minister of State to look favourably on the Bill that I will be bringing forward. In the long run, there must be some system whereby employers can contribute to a fund that would cover those eventualities. Even if employers choose to put a certain amount of money away, it is taxed. If they put away a week's wages for some of the staff, they have to pay tax on it. They cannot offset it or make any provision. A businessman I know had to cash in all of his private pension in order to cover redundancy payments. Even that did not cover him and now there is a charge on his family home. I have spoken to various Ministers about this. They have the greatest sympathy for this person and for others in similar circumstances, but that is not much good.

I welcome this Bill and the provisions it contains. I also welcome the structures the Government put in place during the pandemic. I thank the Minister of State for bringing this Bill forward and I wish him well with it.