Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

Successive Governments have built up the body of law. It is not fair or appropriate for the current Government to pretend it is responsible for all of these measures.

I take issue with the notion there has been a substantial increase in the number of labour inspectors. If they are all at work today, there are 31 labour inspectors. The full complement has not been available to make inspections recently. A total of 31 inspectors to police a workforce of over 2 million is little short of hopeless and I would not blow my trumpet in this respect were I the Minister or Minister of State.

The Minister of State may have met the Hungarian Minister for Labour Affairs when he visited Ireland a fortnight ago. Hungary, with a population approximately twice that of Ireland, has 190 inspectors. Half that figure should be an appropriate regime to monitor our labour law but we only have a fraction of it, approximately a tenth of what is available in a country such as Hungary. We have much to do.

I ask the Minister of State not to have a knee-jerk reaction to a concrete proposal from the Sinn Féin Party and Opposition benches. The United Kingdom had Departments for labour and industry but now has a new Department for Work and Pensions, which is not a bad combination, to deal with such issues as pensions. The Pensions Ombudsman, who is not a radical socialist, Marxist-Leninist or Trotskyite, indicated there are thousands of construction workers in Ireland not covered by a pension. This is a scandal. We must police and enforce this area as, in many instances, the law is being broken or at least stretched by pretending people are self-employed when they are clearly employees.

There is much work for a Department of work and pensions. The Department of Social and Family Affairs has enough to do on the pensions side of the matter, which will be one of this country's most critical issues in the years ahead. It is a stand-alone issue and, with labour affairs, could merit a full Cabinet post. This possibility should be examined and I put it on the agenda for fair comment.

A motion should not be rejected out of hand because it comes from this side of the House. The knee-jerk reaction of giving out scripts to a number of backbenchers, who have not read the motion, rejecting the motion should not be allowed. One day, this will be a Parliament like real parliaments, where an executive does not rule all and there is debate in which people listen, hear and make rational decisions on the basis of rational argument. We had hoped the committee system introduced in the Houses would achieve that. The Chamber would be more relevant if contributors thought there was someone listening on the Government side of the House. Journalists might cover debates of this sort if it there was meaningful discussion. Even though they may not be the right solution, practical suggestions should be rationally engaged with, their merits debated and international practice examined to see if we, like major corporations, constantly evaluate how effective are the structures we put in place. If we do this as a parliament we will take a major step forward.

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