Ms Maeve McElwee:

Our industrial relations system as it stands is a voluntarist industrial relations system. Looking at collective agreements, they are agreed between employers and their employees, whether the employees are represented by an accepted body, for example, an internal representative group or a trade union. They are agreed at the level of the organisation. They may have been negotiated through the Workplace Relations Commission or may, indeed, even have been ultimately adjudicated on by the Labour Court and recommendations issued. However, they are not legally enforceable. None of it has force of law. They have very strong moral force and they are agreements that have been made. The challenge from that perspective is that one would be taking what is now not a legally binding agreement that an employer and its employees have signed up to and giving it legal effect by virtue of making any ex gratiaelement of that collective agreement a requirement to be paid in an insolvency redundancy situation.