Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

To restate some comments made on Committee Stage, as acknowledged by the Deputy, the Industrial Relations (Amendment) Act 2019 gave members of An Garda Síochána full access, for the first time, to the State's industrial relations mechanisms, including the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, and the Labour Court. As a result, Garda representative associations are in a position to represent their members in national pay talks. This puts them on a par with trade unions in this sense. I accept that certain aspects of the Industrial Relations (Amendment) Act 2019, including protections which apply to registered trade unions that engage in legitimate trade union actions, were not applied to the Garda associations. This was in recognition of the fact that gardaí are not simply "workers" in an everyday sense of the word. They have extensive powers which allow them to protect the peace and, particularly in this context, our security and the security of the State. This is a difference between ourselves and many other jurisdictions. Our police service is responsible not just for policing but also for the security of this State. It has been decided, therefore, that it would not be appropriate to provide all the protections contained in the Industrial Relations Act 1990 to workers who perform such a role, as there is simply greater risk involved in comparison to the roles of more everyday workers. It should again be noted that significant improvements in the arrangements for dealing with human resource issues were made in the 2019 Act. Any revisiting of these issues would be much broader than the scope of this Bill. With that in mind, I am not going to accept this amendment. I am not in a position to support it.

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