Mr. Liam Berney:

I concur with colleagues in terms of their concerns. For ICTU, there is a wider concern. If you legislate in primary legislation that somebody is precluded from being a member of a trade union or a representative association, where does that stop?

Does that give rise to bad thoughts in the heads of bad people in future? It is a very dangerous thing. We have raised these concerns with the Department. In fairness, we all got emails in the course of last week to say the points we made directly to the Department are being considered, including this one. For our organisation and for the trade union movement as whole, it is important to record here that we do not see any justification whatsoever for this and it is a very dangerous place to be going into in our view.