I cannot follow that. I do not know if there is any farm relief in Kerry. I know they will not be there to calve the cows. If you had twins in, God help us altogether. I am delighted to be able to speak on this Bill. I have concerns. I have to declare that I am a board member of a business that employs a considerable number of people. There are not enough of us employers in this Chamber. I know the Ceann Comhairle is an employer. Deputy Healy-Rae has been an employer for a long time and I have been one since 1982. There are not enough of us. If there were, this legislation would not be coming through in droves and heaps - involving health and safety and everything else - without a fair and reasonable assessment as to the impact it will have on employers. I am all for a fair day's wages for a fair day's work, and we have great employees and a great relationship. I salute them. Without them, my company and Deputy Healy-Rae's company would not function. We have to have fairness and some consideration for the small employers. They are the backbone of the country. I have heard some comments here, and I fully agree with them. The small man has no organisation to represent him. Small businesses have to organise all the work and make sure the money is in the bank to pay. It used to be Friday evening but now it is Wednesday with bank transfers. It is so important in rural Ireland especially and in urban Ireland that small businesses are supported. Ní neart go cur le chéile. Tá aithne ag an Aire ar an seanfhocal sin. It is so important. We are all in this together. This auto-enrolment is disgraceful, it sounds great but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We are heading towards Christmas. Hopefully we will have a bit of Christmas pudding and a bit of custard. The pain of this is that, while it might start small, it goes incrementally up every year. The penalties are €50,000 and jail. Every letter that businesses get now from Revenue lists the jail term at the end. That is fine for the rogues and the people who have to deal with CAB and all but not for the ordinary business person who is working hard and managing one employee or five, ten, 15, 20, 30 or 40 employees. Enterprise Ireland, IBEC and other entities will not talk to you unless you have 50 or more employees. That is a lot of money of a Wednesday. Then there is the PRSI and the insurance schemes and all that goes with that. Deputy Healy-Rae alluded to the new paternity leave and the domestic leave now as well. They are all grand; some of them are needed. Some people need them and I am not saying they do not. However, they all have a cumulative, huge impact on the employer and on the employer's ability to stay going and keep the ship afloat. There are insurance costs, electricity costs, oil costs and carbon tax, that cursed thing. Carbon tax is the biggest fake that was ever imposed by this House. We have not been able to debate it for ten years. It is just added every year to the budget as a measure that comes in. Then we find out, when I asked the Taoiseach about the couple of hundred million - €680 million, I think - that it did not go into where it was supposed to go at all. No, it is gone off in a piggy bank for some other nice lucrative schemes. I met people today talking about the CPOs. I am sorry for diverging a small bit here but I am sick to the teeth of all these grand active travel schemes and we cannot get a shilling to fix a bridge, maintain a road or take out a bad bend. Engineers in Waterford County Council and Tipperary County Council are telling me this. There is money for active travel, for tomfoolery schemes such as putting cycle lanes along a couple of hundred yards of a road like they have done in my area-----

Sentiment score: 0.09

They start here and finish there and go nowhere. We can have cycling and walking lanes and we cannot have money to improve low-cost accident schemes and very important life-saving measures. They showed me a cantilevered part of that greenway today. It was in the Minister's own county, I think. I could be wrong. It may be Galway. They were putting in this massive cantilevered walkway costing billions, not millions. They obviously had money for this if they were proposing it. I am sure the architects have got millions already to design it. We have a bridge in Ardfinnan that is closed with a one-way system for the last 12 to 13 years and we have to have more consultants reports, with the money we have spent on it. Now we have a lovely design for a stand-alone footbridge but it is going to cost €7.5 million. If we spent €2 million on the bridge the first day, it would have been repaired. I hate saying this but I have said it many times. The night of the flood I was on the bridge or beside it. They closed the bridge for the fear. It is a pity it did not go in the flood that night because we would have had a new bridge long ago. I diverted a small bit there but the cumulative impact of all these grandiose schemes is that you have money for things that you do not need at all. The cost burden on employers will include mandatory contributions starting at 1.5% gross salary, rising to 6% over ten years. SMEs operating on tight margins are going to be crucified and that is the simple fact of it. They are only barely surviving. They are nearly under water as it is, with so many increased costs. The administrative complexity highlights ongoing compliance requirements such as monitoring employee eligibility, managing opt-outs and non-enrolments, and updating payroll systems. Who is going to do that in a small business? Is mo bhean chéile a dhéanann é sin sa ghnó atá againne. The bean chéiles are worn out and tired. We do not have the staff like they do in the Departments, the county councils or wherever to pass the work on to this, that or the other secretary. It is a single man and a woman running a business on their own and they are nearly fatigued with the amount of red tape and a lot of baloney that is coming down on top of them. I have no truck for anyone who does not want to have insurance and does not look after their workers and make sure of their health and safety but bucketloads are being fired at them and a lot of it is nonsensical. An awful lot of it is nonsensical but it is making good jobs for the gang, the new brigade we have going around, such as the fellas from the health and safety office and all these inspectors. Most of them could not drive a machine if you gave them the whole of Ireland and yet they can tell you how to drive and operate it safely. It is pure nonsense. I have spoken in the House about the National Employment Rights Authority, NERA, many times. That should be changed to a supporting organisation, especially after the last recession. We had a bit of a boom but now we have tightened up seriously again and are heading into very dark times and choppy waters. NERA should be changed to a national employers support because if we do not have employers, we will not have the jobs. It is as simple as it gets dark this evening at 5 o'clock and it will be daylight in the morning at 7.30 a.m. or 7 o'clock. It is as simple as that. We are not going to have those employers if we do not nurture and mind them. We have not nurtured them for decades. We have put more paperwork on top of them. We are smothered with it. It is paperwork after paperwork. I mentioned earlier about IBEC and organisations like that. IBEC has said it supports the principle of the auto-enrolment - of course it does - but emphasises the need for alignment with other cost pressures. That is what I am talking about: the costs. It could not be coming in at a worse time than now because things are very tight. Margins are very tight because there is no record or account of the insurance costs or the claims. We have talked about reports. Goodness knows, we have offices and agencies now for everything. Useless, toothless and fruitless is what I call all these bodies that are supposed to be looking after the costs to protect the consumers. They are not protecting the consumers; they are fattening themselves. They have the brass plaque up on the wall, the nice office furniture, a big office chair, a fine big job and a team under them. They are costing a fortune. NERA has six offices all over the country. It has the finest of offices. There are many others. We know about all the NGOs that are milking this country and leaving it high and dry but it is the same with these so-called watchdogs that we are setting up. There are so many and we would set up another. The Taoiseach has set up more investigations, organisations and everything else than he has had hot dinners during his time as Minister and as Taoiseach and they are doing nothing only pushing paper. The vast majority of them, as I said, are not fit for purpose. They are jobs for the boys, most of them retired people from here or the Civil Service. They are persecuting people who are the enablers, who want to get the work done, who want to employ themselves first and then employ others and grow their businesses. These are people with good relationships with their employees. They do not want to be lectured and told what to do with legislation after legislation without any pre-legislative scrutiny. Even if we had that here, and this is a criticism of my colleagues, there are not enough self-employed people in this House. They do not have the time nor the energy to go for it because they are too busy working. We have plenty solicitors, barristers, some doctors and whatever else - professional people - but we do not have any self-employed people. This is a sign we are out of kilter with the ordinary working small businesses. If you are out of kilter with the small business people, you are out of kilter with their employees. If you push them out of existence, we will have people on the social welfare. Where will that get us? What I am saying here is ten or maybe 15 years too late. It has just gone beyond a joke. In the name of dead generations and the future generations, we should cry "Halt" here, look at what we are doing to employers and see if can we support them rather than persecute them.

Sentiment score: -0.04