Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick, Fine Gael)

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Bill and acknowledge the presence of Senator Feargal Quinn in the House. Many people have remarked on the legislation in recent days but, in fairness, it would not have been before the House were it not for the work done in the Seanad.

As Deputy McConalogue observed, for many people this Bill comes a little too late but the most important point is that is on the way. All Deputies have constituents we know to have been burned, who were subcontractors working to contract. I grew up in a house where my father worked in an area associated with construction. We always heard about people who got burned when we were young but the number of people who have been scalded by contractors in the past few years is frightening.

We tend to overlook the importance of the construction industry. It grew to an unsustainably high level in the previous ten years but now it is at an unsustainably low level and needs to be stimulated. This legislation is an important aspect of restarting the construction industry and instilling confidence in it once again. People are worried about re-engaging in construction, particularly in subcontracting roles, because without protection they are like lambs to the slaughter. It is bad to be burnt once but to be burnt more than once is very difficult for families.

The construction industry has left many difficulties in many communities but the vast majority of people working in construction were ordinary decent people who were trying to keep their families. When we talk about construction, there is a temptation to lump everyone into one category and suggest that they were all developers. They were not all developers and developers did not cause all the problems with the subcontractors. In our local authority areas, we all know of contracts that went pear-shaped. The Bill is an opportunity to examine tendering, especially when we are about to embark on Irish Water, which will be one the largest utility companies in the history of the State. Irish Water will enable inevitably involve subcontractors at several levels. My concern is when the contractor is on a go slow or goes missing on a contract involving the Department of Education and Skills, for example, subcontractors may be far from the original location and may not know the personalities involved. They may not be able to get answers and they may find it difficult and frustrating to get money. However they may be afraid to raise their heads or raise their voices and draw attention to it because the likelihood of the main contractor getting work from local authority or State agency will have consequences for them getting work as a subcontractor. The contractor has the subcontractor between a rock and a hard place and it is about time Departments, local authorities and State agencies included a mechanism to determine how contractors have treated subcontractors. That may involve asking subcontractors how they have been treated.

We are in a race to the bottom when awarding contracts. In the laying of water mains, the building of local authority houses and work on schools, we see that it takes more than a baseline figure to determine whether a person is capable of doing the job. The lowest baseline figure may not come from the best person but we do not take all these factors into consideration. The essential factor, which we do not take into consideration, is how people treat their subcontractors. If the contractor was found guilty in the Circuit Court of ignoring the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act, it would be treated as a black mark against the person when awarding future contracts. However, we seem to take the attitude that we can treat people differently to how we treat employees when they are three steps removed from the main contractor. That is grossly unfair. In light of the establishment of Irish Water, I would like to see something done to make contracts more robust. School projects have been abandoned, water mains works have been abandoned and the group water schemes require remediation works. It all comes back to a failure of the tender process, which failed to take into consideration the history of these people. If one local authority or board of management can talk to another, one could tell the other that a particular contractor had been problematic from the start.

I welcome the Bill but we must talk about much more than the provisions it contains. Deputies Durkan and McConalogue mentioned bonding of contractors, which is totally inadequate at present. The industry has a major role to play in the recovery of our economy and it should not be all gloom and doom. Fairness is what these people seek and I ask the Minister to take on board this point.

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