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

The workers at the centre of this dispute are in the Visitors Gallery. To be honest, the most fruitful thing that could come out of the short time we have is for the Minister to agree to meet those workers to hear for herself the story they have relayed to us which has left them out on the picket line outside the Kishoge site for the past 11 weeks.

What is going on there is an absolute scandal. Rhatigan has approximately 50% of the publicly-funded school building projects which this Government has trumpeted as a stimulus measure that will create employment. However, we have discovered that the company which got those contracts is treating workers in this way and is engaged in what looks to me like fraud. There is really no other way to describe it because there are certain rules and criteria about what a subcontractor is and the workers do not fit that. They are not self-employed subcontractors. They were taken on and employed by Rhatigans, which did not pay them for weeks, and then they were told they were subcontractors.

The money paid for the work of seven people over all those weeks amounts to an unbelievable €5 per hour, which is less than the minimum wage. This is absolutely outrageous. Is this what is going on with the jobs the Government claims it is creating with these stimulus measures on all of the other Rhatigan sites or on other publicly-funded sites?

If it is, that is an absolute outrage. What we and these workers want to hear is that the Minister will cease payments to Rhatigan until these matters are fully investigated. I appeal to the Minister to speak to those workers now. She will be shocked at what they have had to put up with. It is absolutely outrageous and we hope that the Minister will respond positively and tell us that she will take immediate and urgent action on this.

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