Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That is nonsense. It counts for nothing on a construction site to say the guys in head office have conducted a due diligence process. I am talking about a construction site for any project. The site might have 100 people, some of whom are on the dole, some of whom are not paid the REA rate and some of whom are not tax compliant. I have not mentioned unpaid sub-contractors and annual contracts, but I will get to those in a minute.

To knock on the head what Mr. Murphy has said, I put a parliamentary question to the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Deputy Bruton, asking whether he was assured all Exchequer funded construction projects, which includes those of the NDFA, are completed in accordance with registered employment agreements. This question was answered on Thursday, 22 November. The Minister responded that the National Employment Rights Authority, NERA, had conducted inspections on this and provided its figures for 2010, 2011 and 2012 to end-August. NERA inspected 183 sites and found that there was non-compliance of 51%. NERA conducted 30 inspections this year, to end-September, on electrical registered employment agreements and found there was non-compliance of 37%. The overall level of non-compliance was 49%. Therefore, I give diddly squat credence that the due diligence done in advance of what is happening on the ground, on the basis that the NERA inspections show 51% non-compliance with registered employment agreements, including sites for which the NDFA signed contracts.

The response did not deal with the issue of whether people on the sites were claiming social welfare. That is a different issue, but the NDFA should be concerned about it. What mechanism does the NDFA have in place to check there is compliance in this regard? The NDFA will say it gets a certificate of compliance from an architect when he or she signs off for payment, but that means nothing in practice. Compliance with health and safety rules should also be verified. I put forward the official NERA figures to debunk the theory there is compliance. There is not.