Pat Casey (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will focus on the point on cash tips and I will speak from a practical point of view. It is almost impossible for an employer to regulate them. I have been on both sides of this. I have been through many schemes in many establishments. There have been schemes to pool tips and distribute them throughout the services or pool and distribute them among the waiting staff only, and there have been situations where people keep their tips. In most situations the employer never sees the cash. The cash is almost always given to a waiter or waitress. Very seldom is it given to the employer.

Every establishment has different arrangements for tips, particularly cash tips, and how they are distributed. Most of it is decided by the staff themselves and how they want to distribute the cash tips and whether they want to keep them themselves. I will give the example of one establishment where I tried to introduce pooling tips, whereby they would be divided proportionately based on what part of the service people were involved in. Everybody signed up to it and everybody agreed. The first month went very smoothly but the pool of money gradually got smaller and smaller. It did not work. We are discussing an employer trying to manage, reconcile and distribute cash when he or she has no interaction with it. For bigger functions, where one person pays a bill and leaves a tip, it might be different. When people walk into a restaurant for dinner tomorrow night they will not hand their tip to a manager or the employer. They will hand it to a member of staff. They have the cash. It would be very difficult. I know what the Senator is trying to do and I do not disagree with it but practically on the ground trying to manage it would be almost impossible. On the other side, we would also be leaving a trail for Revenue to follow and I will leave it there.