Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail)

The contrary was the case. Nobody could accuse the EU of trying to undermine workers rights. A strong body of legislation here has come about sometimes as a result of prompting from the EU. In the area of health and safety as well as across the board we have seen that the European Union is committed to the protection of human rights. I think the Deputy will accept there is not much use having all those rights without any employment. It is important to get the balance right between rights and employment to ensure we are competitive so that the economy can grow and prosper, and create opportunity and employment. For that reason we need flexibility, which we have with the model we have with regard to the voluntarist approach and until recently a strong social partnership model that allowed us to sit down and discuss in a very mature fashion how to address workers' pay and conditions in addition to legislative support.

On the other side, we need to be competitive in a globalised economy where there is competition coming from all over the world and from within the EU itself. We need to strike that balance to ensure we have in place rights and protections, but we do not burden business to the point where it cannot compete and we lose jobs. Most Deputies would be conscious of that. Deputy Ferris might look over his speech again and realise that it contains some inaccuracies. If we tried to implement some of his proposals, it could have a major impact on businesses and be damaging to the creation of employment. I believe we are getting the balance right here and as the Bill goes through the parliamentary process we will be quite willing to listen to views from all sides of the House in the context of improving the legislation so that it comes out the other side with the goal of ensuring employment agencies are properly regulated.

While it is not true of Deputies, some commentators outside the House have been confused about the temporary agency workers directive and this legislation; they are fundamentally different. I remember taking part in Council meeting negotiations in Luxembourg that continued to 4 a.m. to get what we believed was a fair approach that respected the Irish position of voluntarism with social partnership. Many other countries have collective bargaining systems. They would have had derogations from the temporary agency workers directive. That would have put us at a disadvantage in the context of competition from within the EU. We held out because we believed in the social partnership model we had at the time, and which we hope we can bring back again if we can address some of the current difficulties. The overall approach of conducting our business through social partnership, through negotiations and through the voluntarist approach was respected. I believe we got a very fair deal and I hope the social partners will now begin the process of the transposition of that directive here. I urge them to start moving that process along because 2011 and 2012 are rapidly approaching. Deputy Ferris will be aware that we need to keep our eye on a few dates in the future.

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