Minster for Social Protection Regina Doherty. Image: Sam Boal Minster for Social Protection Regina Doherty. Image: Sam Boal IRISH BUSINESS LOBBY group Ibec has warned that a package of up to €6 billion euro to provide “income continuity” for employees impacted by the Covid-19 crisis is needed to insure against the fallout for economy and business sectors.
Most of those employees will avail of the unemployment benefit of €203 made available by the Government, while those infected with the coronavirus can avail of a €305 illness benefit. Those measures have been helpful. Our view to date is they have not been enough. “So we are calling for much more ambition in terms of the scale of measures required. At the core of that, the philosophy is very much around ensuring that we continue to keep income flowing into households and Ireland is an absolute outlier here in an international context.
“We’re suggesting that we think the 70% range is about appropriate and the overall costings will depend on what cap you put on it and looking at the average income of workers in the most impacted sectors, we have costed this particular model at around a €30,000 [income] average,” O’Brien said. It wants measures to protect those areas before moving to a ‘reboot’ stage once the Covid-19 crisis is over, when inevitably there will be a slowdown in economic growth, but nowhere near the damage caused by the financial crash a decade ago.