Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail)

I welcome the comments from Deputies this morning and in the previous debate we had three weeks ago. Based on those contributions, there is broad agreement for the thrust of the Bill. As it flows through this House and meanders through the parliamentary process we look forward to listening to the contributions of all Deputies on Committee and Report Stages and thereafter of the Members of the Upper House.

While Second Stage speeches sometimes move beyond the ambit of the Bill, some interesting points were made. We all agree that exploitation is an insidious evil before which we should put every roadblock to try to root it out. It is insidious on a number of fronts. It undermines a basic right of fair pay for fair work. More importantly, as Deputy Naughten pointed out, it undermines the fabric of society and inherently creates racial tensions when one sees exploitation, with workers brought in to displace local jobs. We need to be very conscious of that, particularly in the context of a downturn when we have rising unemployment. If one sees displacement of workers because of other workers being brought in who are exploited, it can have a very damaging effect on society and localities.

For that reason the broad thrust of all the legislation put through in the coming months, and legislation already introduced, is to ensure that there is a strong corpus of employment rights legislation. We have that in place. In fairness, it would be important for Deputy Ferris to look at the overall context of protections this and previous Governments have introduced, mainly in consultation with social partners. These are further commitments into which we have entered in the context of Towards 2016 to ensure that we have a strong body of employment rights legislation to protect workers.

The Employment Agency Regulation Bill is one plank. We also have the Industrial Relations (Amendment) Bill, to which the Deputy referred, and the Employment Law Compliance Bill. We also have the further issue of the transposition of the temporary agency workers directive itself. We hope that can be done through the social partners entering discussions and coming up with solutions to ensure we can transpose it in a meaningful way that adapts to the Irish labour market and understands our labour system and the primarily voluntarist approach taken here.

I do not believe the Government can be accused of reneging on commitments in the area of protecting workers' rights and ensuring that exploitation is rooted out. We put in place up to 90 labour inspectors. Deputy Naughten referred to it, and I know he referred to it on numerous occasions when I had responsibility for labour affairs. We reached 90, but because of the moratorium and other difficulties, it has dropped back somewhat. To put it into context, we had a shrinkage of the economy last year. There is less employment activity and labour inspectors are very vigilant. I often hear from all sides of the House condemnation of excessively enthusiastic labour inspectors. However, they are charged with a responsibility to enforce employment rights legislation, DRAs and EROs and to ensure employment legislation is complied with.

There has been broad support for the Bill and I welcome the contributions from the Deputies. Reference was made to the Lisbon treaty and whether we might have had success in the first referendum. Obviously, we would have had success in the first referendum if the debate had been based on the facts of the contents of the Lisbon treaty as opposed to much of the spurious debate that went on. There was the introduction of Laval, Viking and other areas, and the suggestion of the undermining of workers' rights.

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