Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

There is no doubt that Gateway is a blueshirt fantasy. Those in Fine Gael must be becoming terribly excited about the prospect of forcing people to work for next to nothing. They probably dreamed about this for years but never thought they could get away with it. Suddenly, however, they have their opportunity. They are going to displace real, proper, permanent, secure, well-paid and trade-union supported jobs with what effectively is slave labour. People are going to be dragooned into doing work which desperately needs to be done. There is no doubt about the latter because how could we not need individuals to work for local authorities whose staffing complements have been drastically reduced in recent years? In that context, 20% of the workforce of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council have been axed as a result of the prevailing policy of austerity. There is a desperate need for maintenance work to be done on people's council houses, for repairs to be made to roads, for parks to be cleaned up, for graffiti to be removed, for bins to be emptied and for flood relief works to be carried out. There are construction workers and hundreds of other people in every area who would be more than willing to do this work but they should be paid for doing it. These individuals should not be enslaved and forced to do the work to which I refer on the cheap.

What the Government proposes to do is completely outrageous. One would expect this from the blueshirts because they would probably confine all of us to boot camps if they got the opportunity. However, for the Labour Party to have anything to do with what is proposed - particularly in light of its historic relationship with the trade union movement - is simply beyond belief. Essentially, the Labour Party is scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel in order to undermine proper jobs and facilitate both job displacement and what effectively is slave labour. That is an absolute disgrace.

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