Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Ceann Comhairle's office for allowing me to raise this issue and I thank the Minister for attending. I wish to draw his attention to a gross injustice being perpetrated by a wealthy, large, multinational conglomerate against a group of some of the most decent, loyal and hard working people I am privileged to know. I am referring to the Wallis dispute in Limerick.

The Wallis shop is one of a number of units owned by the Arcadia Group, a multinational corporation headquartered in London. There is a long-standing agreement to the effect that, when the company makes someone redundant in Ireland, it makes a redundancy payment of five weeks per year's service - the statutory redundancy that it is legally obliged to pay plus three weeks of its own volition.

The company has suddenly changed the goal posts. In respect of the Wallis group of workers, it has decided that it will only pay 2.75 weeks per year's service, which is its statutory obligation plus 0.75. This is despite the fact that, only a few short months ago when the company was dealing with other redundancies in Dublin, it paid the five weeks even though the staff in question had nothing like the length of service of the staff in Limerick. These people have served the company loyally for as long as 20 years or more. They have built the business from the ground up and into the undoubted success that it is today.

The amount of redundancy is not the only issue. There are also issues about how the company is handling restructuring. While I do not have time to go into the matter in detail, suffice to say that the treatment being meted out to the employees in this regard can only be described as shoddy, shabby and contemptible.

We should look for a moment at the multinational corporation that is involved in this sort of skulduggery. The Arcadia group has over 10,000 employees and is privately owned by a gentleman called Sir Philip Green who is well known in financial and society circles throughout the world. Photographs of him are to be seen as often in the society pages as in the financial pages, besporting himself on his yacht in Monte Carlo with his rich and famous friends.

This company recently announced that it was in the acquisitions business. The announcement stated that "being debt free, gives us the balance-sheet and the flexibility for further acquisition". Incidentally, the company recently transferred £92 million from its Irish operation to its headquarters in the UK. When asked about that, the company said it was for house-keeping purposes.

This company is literally awash with cash and has benefited enormously from the loyal service of its Irish workforce, including the workers in Limerick. Is the Minister prepared to intervene in this case? Those people are walking up and down outside the store in all sorts of weather. The Minister of State, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, knows exactly where it is. They are now in their 17th day and some of them are there for up to six days a week. They are determined to stay there for as long as it takes to vindicate their rights. Will the Government stand idly by, wringing its hands while loyal, decent, law-abiding people are being treated in this manner by an English-based multinational company?

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