Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That is not what I said at all. I said that I am very much committed to strengthening the legislative framework if we can and if it is worthwhile. The consensus is on having a fund because someone has to pay into that fund. That is a discussion on which consensus was reached in 2002 regarding the insolvency fund and so on. The situation with legislation is if the Department can make a judgement call where reviewing all this that we can strengthen this position, we will do that. That is a commitment we gave to Gerry Light of Mandate. We had this discussion in the context of Debenhams but it was a general conversation where he made it clear to me that the campaign by the Debenhams workers had two parts - first, to pursue their entitlements and rights, which the State is not involved in all that because it is a private situation with a private company, and, second, to strengthen the legislative position. I committed to doing that, as did the Tánaiste and the Minister of State, Deputy Troy. We are doing that work in the Department. The Deputy asked if that involves implementing the six proposals in the Duffy Cahill report and I cannot say. We will strengthen that and we might go further than the recommendations, or we might do it differently. Previously it was decided not to implement the recommendations and now we are looking at that. A few are relevant but may need to be slightly changed. The report's authors explicitly said many times that their terms of reference were very narrow. We are going beyond that, which is helpful and worthwhile, and I think it will result in legislative changes.