Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Some days you get lucky with amendments and some days you do not. All of mine have been ruled out of order but I want to speak broadly, if I can, to the intention of those amendments. I understand we cannot get into the substance of them and I do not intend to do that. The amendments had a single purpose, namely, to deal with the issue of tactical insolvencies. I fully accept that is not within the scope of this Bill. Maybe the Minister of State will take a little time to update us on the plan for the action on collective redundancies following insolvency. I am aware there is some work under way on that. I got that in a reply to a parliamentary question and it would be helpful if we could hear that.

The Minister of State is well aware of the issue. We saw Clerys broken into two companies. One was the operations and the other was employing the workers. They never knew they were working for two separate companies. They only knew they were working for Clerys, which many of them had worked for all their lives and given good and loyal service to. Then overnight their jobs were gone. The assets were transferred to the operations company, that was liquidated and the workers were left absolutely high and dry. A similar but not exactly the same situation happened in Debenhams, but whatever the technicalities of it the upshot is the workers were left high and dry at the end of it. We saw it with Clerys, La Senza, Paris Bakery and TalkTalk. They are what are known as tactical insolvencies. The purpose of the amendments I put forward were to deal with tactical insolvencies and situations whereby companies use the courts to engage in a tactical liquidation. That means they can avoid paying what are, essentially, their debts.

This legislation recognises the fact that, through no fault of their own, workers found themselves on lay-off and they should not find themselves disproportionately impacted by something that was not their fault. Likewise, in the situation of a tactical insolvency, workers who have given good and loyal service find themselves in a situation whereby the company goes out of business and they are left with absolutely nothing. The majority of companies do not engage in this practice but legislation is required for those that do. They are only small in number and I would not want to portray this is as all workers being in danger of this happening to them. However, when it happens it is absolutely devastating. The Minister of State will know this because he has met the workers from Debenhams and some of these other companies. He knows what needs to be done. Many of these cases end up being high-profile because the practice is quite shocking to people. They find themselves in a state of shock.

I appreciate my amendments have been ruled out of order. However, the Minister of State might take this opportunity to advise us about it. According to the reply to a parliamentary question I tabled: "Work has ... commenced on the drafting of the Terms of Reference for the Employment Law Review Group ...". That is to organise the membership. The reply states the group hopes to be up and running "on a non-statutory basis, in Q1 of 2022". We are heading into the last month of that quarter. I apologise as I appreciate this parliamentary question does not relate directly to the legislation but it is in the general area of redundancy. I ask that the Minister of State provide an update. If he cannot, a response in writing would be good. We all had huge sympathy for the workers from Debehams and we all saw what happened. When we looked back we saw that was a repetition of similar - not exactly the same, but similar - situations in other companies. As we move out of the pandemic, if there is going to be any pandemic dividend this must be part of it. Work on tactical insolvencies and collective redundancies must be part of the pandemic dividend, if you want to call it that. It should not have taken a pandemic to put it on the agenda but the workers deserve nothing less than that. I thank the Chairman.