Gerald Nash (Labour)
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I hope I will be able to provide some helpful insight. I agree with Deputy Neville and others that we should not break down on party lines in discerning a solution to this. It is an issue of our common humanity and we must unite around that in our quest for solutions. However, political responsibility must be taken at senior ministerial level. No ministerial responsibility has been taken for the drift in the system over time.

As Mr. Fleming correctly pointed out, a group chaired by the then Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy Coveney, devised the non-EEA permit scheme, with the support of the Department of Justice and Equality and others. There was a small element of the scheme where employment rights became an issue and where a memorandum of understanding was required to try to have some type of risk-based enforcement and inspection process in place. I recall attending the last meeting of that group in December 2015. Everyone congratulated themselves on a job well done, but I and officials in the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation put our hands up and told them the job was not done as we had no idea how it was going to be enforced or what the inspection regime would be from the perspective of vindicating employment rights. As Mr. Fleming knows, I spent two to three months trying to bang heads together, for want of a better phrase. They were from eight agencies - the Sea-Fisheries Protection Authority, Bord Iascaigh Mhara, the Workplace Relations Commission labour inspectorate, the Health and Safety Authority, the Revenue Commissioners, the Marine Survey Office, An Garda Síochána and the Naval Service - and five Departments. This was to try to sign a memorandum of understanding as to who would take responsibility for inspecting ships and, critically, the sharing of information, because when there are limited inspection resources, best practice insists that one must share information and try to identify the actors in an industry who might be liable to be non-compliant. That was difficult.

I do not wish to make an explicit political point on the drift we have now and I hope people will not misinterpret this, but there must be direct ministerial responsibility for reforming this, and there has been silence from the political system over the last period.