The Government has promised to introduce tax changes to make it more attractive for employers to share profits with their workers.

The Tanaiste, Ms Harney, stressed the Government's commitment to widening profit sharing yesterday and said the issue will form a significant part of the negotiations on a new national agreement to replace Partnership 2000. Ms Harney was speaking in Limerick where she announced 250 new jobs at Teles Ireland, an international supplier of telecommunications products at the Shannon Free Zone.

She also attended a function to mark the 25th anniversary of Wyeth Ireland and an announcement that Dell's plant in Limerick is the first of its facilities internationally to be awarded the ISO 14001 accreditation, the international standard for environmental management systems.

Her comments were welcomed by the employers' lobby group, IBEC, yesterday. Its director of economic affairs, Mr Brian Geoghegan, said that while mechanisms to promote share options schemes in public companies were already in place, there was a need to explore how profit-sharing could be implemented in other organisations.

"The Government needs to explore a new mechanism to make the tax system more conducive to profit sharing and this needs to be done quickly," he said.

Ms Harney said she supported companies involving their employees in stock and share options or in profit or gain-sharing schemes.

"I think there are a number of advantages. Workers have a huge stake in a company and the success of the company depends on the quality of the employees and their motivation," she said. It was an employers' market and, if companies wanted to keep their employees and avoid the kind of mobility happening in some sectors, then it was sensible for them to involve their employees in stock options, Ms Harney said.

"There are things that the Government needs to do in the taxation system to encourage more companies to go down this route. I believe it would be a very significant way of maintaining wage moderation and yet ensuring that in highly successful and profitable companies their employees can increase substantially their take-home pay."

The Tanaiste said she was hoping that in the context of the negotiations to follow Partnership 2000, this would be one of the areas looked at seriously by employers and trade unions and by Government.

"I think that this can be a new and imaginative way of extending what is a very limited scheme in the Irish economy at the moment across the economy to other sectors where it has not been experienced heretofore."