John O'Mahony (Mayo, Fine Gael)

I welcome the Construction Contracts Bill 2010 which has taken a long time to get to this Stage. I compliment the Government on bringing it forward and Senator Feargal Quinn on initiating it. It is one of the most overdue Bills and is needed for many reasons. It is a pity it has not been in place since 2007 when the crash came in the construction industry. There is much talk on all sides of this House about the pain inflicted on the industry with up to 160,000 jobs lost. There are many human stories behind these job losses. This Bill will prevent much of the pain that people have suffered in recent years from happening again.

The only difficulty is that subcontractors, and those who work for them, are still being destroyed by receiving no payments when a main contractor goes out of business. Only last week, Mayo County Council had to take control of two sites, the new library in Swinford and Park View estate in Charlestown, as only 95% and 99%, respectively, of them were completed. The main contractor had been paid up to date but went out of business leaving 40 subcontractors high and dry, losing large amounts of money. I spoke to several of them this morning to understand more about what happened. One informed me that because this large contractor in the west had gone out of business last year, the sub-contractor has lost €266,000. That is unsustainable for a subcontractor and cannot be justified. Although this Bill is too late for such subcontractors, I hope it will provide certainty for subcontractors in future. No big business could sustain losses like that, never mind a small subcontractor business.

We often discuss how people are unable to get jobs and although the subcontractor has plenty of offers to price jobs now but he cannot take the risk as his business has been destroyed by the losses he has been forced to take. For many subcontractors, if they are employing two or three workers and have seen business contract over the past few years, at least the workers would get social welfare if they are laid off. The subcontractors would be self-employed, meaning there is a double whammy as they have no social welfare entitlements at all and are facing utter ruin as a result. I want to concentrate on the positive aspects of this Bill but it is a live issue; I do not know how long it will take to enact the legislation but that time cannot come soon enough. It would have been beneficial to have had it in place three years ago. We should fast-track this through the legislative procedure.

I understand this will not cover where materials have been supplied to building sites and I hope that can be reconsidered. If a concrete company supplies thousands of blocks, it would be hard to retrieve them if they were put in a wall, and it would be difficult to recover the value. The Bill in the Seanad only considered contracts under €200,000, and I welcome that we are examining that again. Most of the cases I am aware of would be in the lower bracket of the amounts discussed, and if the €200,000 level remained, it would exclude certain cases, which would not be good.

I welcome the Bill overall. There is much work to be done by the Government and this Bill should be put into law as quickly as possible. Many subcontractors have made the point to me that although many main contractors are slow in making payments, they continue to get Government contracts. They may even get those contracts if they fail to pay subcontractors completely, and that should be considered by this Government. We should not hand out contracts to companies which treat subcontractors in such a way.

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