Ms Gráinne O'Toole:

Yes, we met the Department. We met the Minister and he gave a commitment to address the case involving Mohammed Younis. We know that the intention of the Bill is to address such cases, but we would like to see it strengthened to tackle exploitation, which we believe is at the root of the problem. We have met the Department on a number of occasions and commend the civil servants on using a different approach. They asked us to make a submission early on, and then we went for meetings with them to discuss it. They used a problem-solving approach. We did not achieve a lot of things. Initially, we would have wanted to uphold the integrity of the Labour Court system so that it could take cases from all workers, but it seemed unable to deal with the contract issue. That is why they have taken the Younis case outside the Labour Court system and put it into the civil courts. We welcome that as long as workers can access it. We do not want a provision whereby people would find it difficult to prove their circumstances. We want exploitation to be a criterion for accessing one's rights. The officials were not interested in looking in a more long-term way at the categories that we have discussed - I suppose that their priority was the Bill - but we urged them to look at the ineligible categories in the lead-up to the Bill, given the type of information that we were feeding to them. We believe that a review should be conducted with the appropriate bodies, allowing us to present our information and statistics and say what we are seeing.