Noel Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)

——on all sides of the House for interfering in the day to day running and management of a company.

To ensure we keep party politics out of it as much as possible we created an elaborate set of labour relations arrangements such as the Labour Court, which has been established for a long time, the Labour Relations Commissions and other ways and means such as partnership and implementation bodies, to try to ensure the people in dispute discussed the dispute and tried to resolve their difficulties through the partnership model. It was not felt political intervention was the best way.

Those mechanisms are in place and they were used in this instance to try to resolve outstanding difficulties. A Labour Relations Commission report was made on this and accepted by the unions. A group of workers decided to step outside of it. From everybody's point of view, we are back to square one. The mechanisms that exist should be used where necessary. There is no excuse for this type of dispute where workers step outside the mechanism.

I regard the recognition of unions as extremely important. In the past, unions have shown themselves to be responsible in their attitude and response to the national interest. Partnership has enshrined that. A number of people decided they wanted to step outside of that. One cannot make much of an effort to avert something that one does not know will happen. By its very nature, a wildcat strike flares up, as this did, even though there were underlying issues. Now that the LRC is communicating with both union and management, that is the place to resolve this dispute rather than anywhere else and I sincerely hope it will be resolved.

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