Mr. Tom Hayes:

I do not disagree with anything that Mr. Sheridan has said. One thing we would need to do is ensure the presence of people in the Workplace Relations Commission and the Labour Court who understood these matters. The folks who work in both bodies understand Irish industrial relations and its processes, which is why they are employed. As the European works councils would bring a new dimension, we would need to ensure that at least two or three people in the WRC were specialists in this area and that a couple of people who work in the Labour Court also understood this stuff. We, as a group of companies, would be more than willing to make available our accumulated expertise and would happily do so in conjunction with SIPTU. It is not that we want people to think like we do. It is just that we have years of accumulated experience of dealing with these matters as does SIPTU and some of its European colleagues. We would be happy to make our expertise available by way of training programmes, discussions, conferences or whatever, which would act as a starting point for getting the expertise that we need to properly deal with these matters. I wish to emphasise that I do not want to be in court and neither do the companies with whom I work. We want a dialogue with the people with whom we work.

Earlier Deputy Bruton asked about the apprehension in the 1990s and I believe that a lot of that is gone. We want to build on the progress that we have made, we do not want to be in court and we want to resolve problems when they arise. We do not want problems in the first place but when we have them, we want to resolve them and want to be able to do so in the way Mr. Sheridan has described in accordance with the Irish industrial relations procedures of mediation and dialogue.