Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

This is the second January in a row where workers have been forced to occupy premises. In this case, the workers involved heard about their fate on the media, which is completely unacceptable. I am not sure about the Minister's faith in the receiver when it was the National Consumer Agency that found that HMV Ireland was a separate operation from HMV UK. We did not know that until the NCA pointed it out. There are serious gaps in this area.

The company advised investors before Christmas that there was significant doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern. Surely it is within our capacity to amend the law that where a company issues such a warning, it is not allowed to trade in vouchers or accept money for future purchases when it knows it cannot honour them. That is how we could intervene there.

There are European regulations on gift vouchers that do not seem to apply here. Why if I got a voucher issued by HMV UK can I redeem it, but I cannot redeem the voucher issued by HMV in Grafton Street? The National Consumer Agency did not do enough in December to highlight this. A large retail company issued a warning; the National Consumer Agency should have acted on that straight away and warned consumers about it. There should be provision in law that if a company issues a public warning that its retail operations are restricted, it cannot trade in vouchers.

See this speech in context