Ms Edel McGinley:

It is good to hear support from Fine Gael for a move to more skills and rights for workers. I will speak about seasonal work and Ms Korotkevica might come in on the WRC and access to legal redress. We do not have a definition of what seasonal work is, how long it is, where it is and where it happens. It is not just in fruit picking but also in tourism, education and many other sectors. We could say there is seasonality in many things. There is a danger that everything can be defined as seasonal so we have to be very careful about this type of approach. We also need to think about the rights of workers, their access to PRSI and pensions, whether there is portability of their social welfare rights and how this is managed. None of this has been communicated to us or thought through as far as I can see.

Many years ago we had a situation where people came on group seasonal work permits. The majority of people became undocumented after those work permits ceased. Everybody we worked with at the time fell out of the system. There is a danger that if we do not provide transitional measures and work is available for people to access the labour market people will become undocumented, and I can guarantee that Migrant Rights Centre Ireland will be mopping it up. We are trying to look at this from a prevention perspective. We would like to see how we define seasonality. It suits some workers to come and work but that is on a very specific regional basis.

Workers who come from Romania and Bulgaria, for example, have the right to work and to mobility, and there is a different set of rights and circumstances. On the other hand, if someone is asked to come from, say, India, Pakistan, Morocco or somewhere else outside the EU, there is a different set of expectations when he or she moves to Europe. We have to understand migration more broadly. We are not in favour of limiting the rights of people but rather of giving them more rights and allowing them to transition into other work. The seasonal work issue needs more discussion and thought and clearer definitions of what it would be and what the transitional measures would look like.

There is a justice issue with family reunification. General employment permits and critical skills employment permits involve different sets of rights. Under the latter, the holder is allowed to bring along his or her family immediately - no questions asked. It is assumed that people are coming here to settle, whereas in the context of the general employment permit, there is an assumption that people are not and it is a temporary system. A general employment permit holder has to wait a year before he or she can apply for family reunification. We know moving with one's family is good and helps the person to settle in, but the person has to be earning a certain amount. There is also the family income supplement threshold whereby the applicant has to be able to demonstrate that he or she can support his or her family. Ms Korotkevica might comment further on that and the WRC.