Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 168:

In page 488, line 2, after "due," to insert "or in the case of an employee or a group of employees a sum exceeding €1,500,".

Legislation is complex at the best of times but this Bill is so cumbersome, it is very difficult to have proper oversight. I ask the Government not to produce any Bills this size again. Will the Minister of State be accepting any amendments provided by the Opposition?

Some of these amendments relate to the amounts of money in respect of which people can act. There is a significant change that relates specifically to the minimum amount of indebtedness entitling a creditor to petition a company that is wound up and that increases the amount from €1,269 to €10,000. At the moment, anybody who owes over that initial figure can petition the wind up of a company. This amount has been increased to €10,000, which will impact unfairly on lower income employees who obviously do not have €10,000 of indebtedness and will render them unable to act.

Amendment No. 169 seeks the insertion of a formula of words which would increase the responsibility of the individuals working within the firm. The amendment states that:

Where a breach of employment law is committed by a body corporate or by a person acting on behalf of a body corporate and is proved to have been so committed with the consent, connivance or approval of, or to have been attributable to any neglect on the part of, a person who, when the breach was committed, was a director, manager, secretary or other similar officer of the body corporate or a person who was purporting to act in any such capacity, that person (as well as the body corporate) shall be liable to be proceeded against as if guilty of the breach committed by the body corporate.

The amendment seeks to do what it says on the tin. It seeks to hold people to account.

Amendment No. 175 focuses on the issues of preferential creditors in a wind up. While it appears to broadly reflect the provisions of section 285 of the 1963 Act, the total amount payable to the employee creditor has been increased from €300 to €10,000 in 2014. In reality, this is very low and we could do with raising it to a higher figure, for example, €40,000, which is just above the average industrial wage.

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