Ms Phil Ní Sheaghdha:

Go raibh maith agat. The Deputy is right. We did not leave any week go by when we did not raise this issue with both the HSE and the Department of Health. We then made contact with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. Every single Department's answer was that it depended on what NPHET said.

We believe that an employer has a broader responsibility than waiting for the very right and very correct public health advice. We now believe that the employer has an opportunity to do the right thing, and that is to restore the annual leave that these workers had to take and to restore the parental leave, which is unpaid, that they also had to take to ensure that their contract of employment was maintained. It is absolutely disgraceful that the workers who were at the front line, right central and bang in the middle - they did not hesitate or blink but went right in there - are the ones who now will have suffered the biggest loss and will have no annual leave for the remainder of the year, which potentially exposes them to being more vulnerable to infection. We believe that is completely incorrect.

We believe that the employer did have choices. There was much they could have done in respect of rosters, reducing hours or allowing people to come to work for some of their week if they could make arrangements. There was none of that. It was a very rigid approach. Frankly, as we say in our submission, they have an opportunity now to correct the wrong.