Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

This Bill is particularly suited to Committee Stage and I hope the Minister will provide for adequate time to deal with a range of complex issues. I hope he will approach the debate on Committee Stage with an open mind. In my short contribution I hope to deal in a philosophical way with issues that are important for us as a nation. We have been tardy in the way we have approached issues that are germane to this Bill but go beyond its scope and involve other Departments. It is time we had this debate in a joined-up fashion and I hope the Minister is open-minded in respect of this and can communicate with his colleagues. We must seek to construct a framework that goes beyond the economic needs of Ireland and considers how Irish society is to be constructed in a coherent way.

In June I welcomed the belated publication of the Employment Permits Bill, one that had been promised by the Minister's predecessor for publication prior to Easter 2003. It has been a long time coming and one would expect a radical Bill after such a period of gestation. I do not consider this Bill particularly radical and it could have been produced long before now.

It is legislation that is urgently needed as Ireland's employment structure and base has changed beyond recognition, as the Minister outlined in his contribution. The delay in producing an appropriate legislative framework to address the changing nature of Ireland's employment structure and the relatively new phenomenon of significant non-national migration into this State has had real consequences. We must recognise that. As the Government dithered and delayed, the exploitation of some foreign workers by a minority of ruthless employers was allowed continue without interruption. There was some interruption when particularly notorious cases were pointed out, not necessarily by the inspectorate employed by the Minister or his Department but often by vigilant trade unionists or, at least on one occasion, vigilant Members of this House.

For years there has been a recognition by many that our current work permit system is unfair and unreasonable. Like so many millions of Irish through the decades, it has condemned many foreign workers who have come to these shores to seek a better economic situation for themselves to a form of bonded labour that we would have deplored had it been inflicted upon Irish nationals elsewhere. There is a certain irony, as other Members pointed out, in the fact that last week in this House and this week in the other House a motion was debated commending a legislative measure currently going through the Congress in the United States to deal with the undocumented Irish while we have allowed a situation to exist in our jurisdiction where many decent, hard working people who have come to this land for no better reason than to improve their economic circumstances and those of their families have been dealt with, to put it at its mildest, in a shabby fashion.

The inability of the Minister's Department to properly monitor workplace conditions and terms of employment has been starkly revealed in some recent high profile cases. Regardless of what the Minister says, it is abundantly clear that the labour inspectorate charged with monitoring workplace conditions and ensuring the laws we enact in these Houses that govern workers and their rights and entitlements is inadequate and under-equipped to monitor 2 million workers in a complex and changing social and legal environment.

The facts speak for themselves. Despite the huge influx of foreign workers over recent times and the evidence that has been presented of systematic exploitation, the number of inspections carried out by the labour inspectorate declined from 8,323 in 2002 to 5,160 in 2004. The number of prosecutions in the same period fell from 25 to 14. We are going backwards in terms of our ability to monitor and ensure that workers, both domestic and non-national, are afforded the full protection of law. We can enact the best legislation possible in these Houses but it is meaningless if employers, or at least a minority of employers, believe they can get away with that. Unfortunately, in a workforce of 2 million the chances are that they can, and we have seen concrete evidence of that. As Deputy Hogan rightly said, this morning at a meeting of the joint committee the Electrical Contractors of Ireland made it clear to the committee that they have the gravest concerns at the ability of the labour inspectorate to monitor their industry, one of many.

Another issue I had not heard before but I put it on the agenda for the Minister is that the volume of cases now coming before the Labour Court will mean the Labour Court itself will become moribund and clogged with cases and will not work efficiently into the future. I will be anxious to have a clear reassurance from the Minister that that is not the case and that the resources and capacity of the Labour Court, as well as his own labour inspectorate, will be expanded to ensure the vigorous nature of Irish law is fully enacted at ground level to ensure we will not have a recurrence of some of the high profile abuses we have witnessed recently.

In this contribution I want to deal in general terms with our position now and what we want to achieve in a society, and I would welcome the Minister's reflections on that. By way of background, we must ask what we want to achieve in terms of the new labour market and structure of employment in this jurisdiction. Do we want to create a selfish system that allows workers to be brought in who are needed for a finite period to fill a particular gap in terms of the work available here only to discard them as soon as that gap can be filled by domestic workers? Is that the system we want to construct or is it a system that acknowledges the need for non-national workers to grow our economy and wishes to afford such people who choose to come here an opportunity to have a stake in our economy, settle in Ireland and be part of a new developing Irish society? That is a fundamental question and the models exist.

In simple terms the Minister has used, in all his press statements since the publication of this Bill, the notion of a green card to which I will return in some detail. The understanding of the green card is the American model. The American model says one can apply to get a green card and have a stake in America, that one has a right to work that is exclusive to one. From that model we have the melting pot of e pluribus unum. People come to that country with their green card with a notion of settling down.

A different model has prevailed in some European countries, for example, the German model is the gastarbeiter. Over generations guest workers, as we have seen with the Turks in Germany, have been separate. They never integrated and the societal difficulty that creates for people who feel no stake in the country they and even their parents have lived in is a real dilemma for Germany. We have seen some of that, although not as starkly, even in the United Kingdom where the second generation of migrants who were brought in during the post-war boom period now feel alien in their own land. The issues are being addressed in terms of people searching for new identities from that of their grandparents who believe they have no stake in the country they were brought up in, that they are seen by that society as alien and, despite having been born, bred and educated in that country, are not part of it. These are the models we have to learn from to ensure we do not create in ten, 20, 30 or 40 years' time an Ireland that is fractured. I raise that as a real issue that we must address and get right. It is not simple legislation the Minister is introducing to fill, in some sort of mechanistic, economic system, a gap in the workforce by bringing in people as if they were cogs only to turf them out again when they are no longer needed. That is a difficult, important decision that Ireland must make for our future and for the sort of society we wish to create.

The original view expressed by the Tánaiste in answering questions in this House some years ago — I know the Tánaiste's predilection to opt for America over Europe but perhaps she is right in this case — was that she wanted to opt for the American model of the green card. My understanding of that was that we would identify economic need within our society. The Minister has done that and his report on the assessment of need has been sent to me. We should fix in general terms the numbers to be dealt with but the Minister has resiled from that position and is not anxious to work on a quota basis. I ask him to be open at least to debate that issue.

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