Plans to strengthen redundancy legislation to be discussed at Cabinet

Minister for Enterprise Simon Coveney will bring a memo to Cabinet on Thursday to strengthen redundancy legislation.

The plan will remove the exemption from notification requirements in respect of collective redundancies caused by an employer’s insolvency.

All collective redundancies will require a 30-day notification period before they take effect, including where the employer is insolvent.

The memo will also propose changing legislation to explicitly provide that the employer’s obligations must also be complied with by a liquidator or similar appointee, where they are managing the collective redundancy process in an insolvency situation.

Ireland set to miss national and EU emissions reduction targets by long way

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Separately, the Department of Agriculture had a delivery rate of more than 90 per cent for the actions it was required to take under the Climate Action Plan for the first three months of 2023.

Minister for Climate Change Eamon Ryan will give a progress report to Cabinet on Thursday morning on how many targets were met in the first quarter of the year.

Agricultural, long considered the laggard sector, has been performing strongly under the plan. The department had the second highest number of actions, yet achieved 91 per cent of the targets.

It also showed that there has been a substantial uptake among farmers for the new environmentally-focused schemes being run by the department.

During the first three months of the year, the €1.5 billion Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme to help improve biodiversity, climate, air and water quality became operational.

Until the end of March, there were more than 46,000 applications for the scheme, accounting for a third of the 135,000 farms in the country. This exceeded the expectations of officials in relation to uptake.

There is also evidence that there has been a significant increase in applications to use more environmental approaches such as the National Liming Programme, multi-sward grasses, and protected urea. All cut down on dependence on chemical fertilisers.

Overall, 27 of the 36 actions scheduled for delivery over the six high-impact sectors were completed on time this quarter.

The period also saw the launch of Ireland’s first electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure strategy. There was an increase of a third in sustainable travel rates and EVs accounted for a quarter of all new cars sold, surpassing diesel sales for the first time.