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

As Ms McElwee says, many employers do not, but those employers who do need the law to tell them what to do. Many employers are grand. They negotiate with their workers and honour agreements. That is fine. We do not need to legislate for those. We need to legislate for a situation where hundreds, if not thousands, of workers were left high and dry and on the picket line for 400 days. People will not be on the picket line for 400 days for nothing. There is obviously an issue here. There already exist different redundancy situations with some people having a collective agreement and some people not having one. Workers with a collective agreement facing redundancy as part of a restructuring have an employer they can negotiate with. With insolvency, that is not always the case. Those workers effectively have no protection because the employer can walk away as Mr. Light pointed out. As Ms McElwee will know, in an agreement with workers, there is give and take. The workers have already given things like productivity and wage restraint as part of the agreement. The employer has got out of that what it was going to get.

There is reference in the agreement to enhanced redundancy, which can be negotiated with an employer in a restructuring arrangement. In an insolvency, however, it is different. That is why there needs to be legislation, as I am sure the witnesses will agree. Not all collective redundancies are the same. Where there is a collective agreement, however, the employer can walk away from it. That is grossly unfair. One could argue that the employer has already got the value of the agreement and can then walk away from it. I am not hearing that the witnesses recognise there is a real problem in this regard or that they think there is a legislative solution.