Ms Nessa Cahill:

Yes. I am conscious it is a question raised earlier that I had not answered. I thank Senator Ahearn for coming back to it. The Senator asked what would be the benefit of a statutory injunction for workers because there is already in existence a common law jurisdiction for a court to order a Mareva injunction to prevent the dissipation of a company's assets. The rationale behind proposal No. 5 is that it would put on a statutory footing the specific right of employees to make an application to court to prevent the dissipation of assets to protect their accrued entitlements. We are seeking to put that on a statutory footing so that employees have a specific right to apply for that protection. We also propose that consideration be given to allowing them to make such an application in the Circuit Court. We are very conscious that one of the issues that arises on a regular basis is the excessive cost of going to the High Court for orders of this nature and we reference the possibility that a statutory provision could be put in place to allow this to be done in the Circuit Court. That is the benefit that we saw arising from proposal No. 5 of our report. It is to be read in conjunction with proposal No. 2, which is a very specific proposal dealing with a set of facts that are very much directed towards the terms of reference we were dealing with, that is, where there are collective redundancies that are anticipated to arise from the transfer of an asset. This is probably of less general relevance to workers than proposal No. 5. The benefit of proposal No. 5 is that there would be a statutory provision in place that workers could avail of.