Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

I find myself agreeing with my fellow trade unionist, Deputy Ross, in his analysis of the role of some of the trade union leaders. My union has a fee half of what Deputy Ross is being charged but we probably still get comparably little service.

It is a great irony to have to witness and listen to the comments of some of the Labour Deputies who have tried to pose themselves as the great defenders and protectors of workers under attack. The reality belies such an idea. We are living in a time where the idea of a secure, permanent and pensionable job is becoming a thing of the past. People are looking back not with nostalgia or with any rhetoric but to a reality that is the casualisation of labour and insecure employment, which has not been seen for decades.

This Government stands over poverty figures indicating that 16% of people have an income of less than €210 per week, with almost 800,000 people in the State living at risk of poverty. We can talk about legislation protecting workers' and women's rights, as other Deputies have in mentioning equal pay.

That is fine on paper but the reality is that the lives of working women are way behind in terms of their male counterparts because of the lack of a social wage, adequate child care and other supports. This means that many women have to leave the workforce and end up in insecure, part-time and vulnerable situations. That is not a fitting legacy to the heroes of Jacobs and the women workers who led the struggle there in 1913.

It is a terrible irony and a poor reflection on the current situation that the rights commissioner service went on a reduced working week in recent times. One of the reasons for this was a reduced workload. Is that reduced workload because workers are being better served at the moment than they were previously? No. It is because most of the cases being brought before rights commissioners were related to people losing their jobs. They involved people seeking to get their last week's wages, holiday pay, references and so forth. The reality is that rights commissioners are not hearing many of the cases that need to be fought because workers are afraid. The idea of people being lucky to have a job is the ideology that is promoted and stood over by this Government.

We must take a step back. On a global scale, our society is wealthier than it has ever been, yet we have millions of young people lying idle when millions of older people have to work longer because they have an inadequate pension. There is much necessary work to be done that could improve the lot of people throughout society. We can look at the situation and say that in many ways, everything is different but it is also the same because poverty is relative. It is the case that we have seen the return of soup kitchens. It is the case that tenements are gone, but are they really? What about the people of Priory Hall who purchased a home which is a noose around their necks, which they have had to move out of and so on?

Workers' share of the national wealth has reduced over recent years because the trade union movement has lost its way. It is precisely because the gains that workers and ordinary people enjoyed in this society were not simply granted but were fought for. Those at the helm of the trade union movement today are very different from the likes of Connolly and Larkin. We now have the prospect of this generation being poorer than their parents, which is an absolute disgrace. James Connolly and Jim Larkin were imprisoned. They led, they were visionaries and they had a view of a new society. We have people today at the helm of the union movement for the banking sector on salaries of almost €200,000. They are in defined benefit schemes while the defined benefit schemes of their members are being shafted. The president of the Teachers Union of Ireland, TUI, who stood over a new starting rate for teachers of less than €30,000, is on a salary of more than €150,000. How can these people represent the interests of ordinary workers? They simply cannot do it. The Labour Party in Government is simply a mouthpiece for the status quoand for these individuals. Many trade union members have bankrolled that party's participation in this Parliament through their union fees which were used to subsidise the election, but they have been betrayed disastrously.

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