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

I am conscious that there is a balancing that has to go on. I fully appreciate that many of those suppliers would be sole traders. They are not facing redundancy but when you lose your job, you lose your job. The badge you put on it is not much consolation. I understand that, but on the flip side, in any agreement between a worker and an employer, there will always be compromise. To get enhanced redundancy, a person may have compromised on something else. It is hard for workers to understand at the end of that process regarding the collective agreement. If anyone has ever negotiated these agreements, which I have, they will know that you are up all night doing them. You could be down in the WRC until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. getting an agreement done. Blood, sweat and tears go into them. Then, at the end, you find that it does not have the standard you thought it had but it has been balloted on and accepted. That is tough, because people will come with their collective agreement and say they agreed and balloted on it, gave up whatever they did and there was a compromise. It is hard for workers to understand why that suddenly has no standing.

I appreciate the contagion and all of that. The counterargument is that somebody has to go first. Why should it not be the workers? There has to be someone at the top of the queue. The only question is who. Whoever is at the top of the queue is pushing down the others who are not, regardless of whether they are small businesses, multinationals or whatever. I appreciate the balance.

Head 20 relates to situations where a transaction is an unfair preference within the timeframe of the winding up of a company and is deemed to be invalid. This covers a period of six months before the winding up of a company. Was that to align with the Companies Act or is there another reason for that? On the same head, has the Department given any consideration to expanding the definition of a connected person or creating additional definitions to cover situations where preferential transactions are made to persons who are not a creditor or a connected person?