Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

I appreciate what the Taoiseach said about the general run of this. However, this comes down to what happens when a clear case of worker exploitation comes to the surface. By any standards, €4 an hour, less than half the minimum wage, is just out of court. It is exploitation in anybody's language. In these circumstances, where the company running this service sacked its entire Irish workforce to replace it with lower paid workers, the agencies of the State must be particularly vigilant to ensure it does not get away with it. The story that this company is paying €4 per hour has been in the air for over a week. What steps have been taken to establish the facts or otherwise of it? I appreciate the Taoiseach does not know. An employment rights authority was supposed to be established under the Employment Law Compliance Bill, but that is not in place. The legislation governing agency workers has not been introduced and the Irish Government is one of three governments which have been blocking the agency workers directive for some time at European level.

We have a practical case here, on which I wish to focus. It is all very well to talk in general terms about workers rights, levels of pay, talks, partnership and so on, but this is a hard case where 500 workers on board this vessel are being paid €4 per hour. What is being done to investigate that and to enforce the national minimum wage in this case? Is there a loophole in our law which allows the company to get away with this?

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