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

I am not yielding on this occasion. The Minister of State will be very welcome to come in when I have finished. Perhaps he is becoming uneasy about his experience in government.

As I stated, the proposition that the troika was in some way micro-managing the industrial relations environment in the State was laughable, but that is what the senior Minister in the Minister of State's Department stated about the reason Fine Gael had refused to enact a pledge it had made prior to going into government. The Competition Authority's judgment was wrong and today the Government had an opportunity to make things right.

I fear that the bottom line is that the Labour Party's influence in the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation is nowhere to be found. The Labour Party has failed to provide fundamental industrial relations rights for freelance journalists, photographers and voice-over actors whose opportunities and rates of pay have fallen significantly in the past few years. When the Minister approaches legislation such as this, I appeal for us to go back and make sure it goes through the Dáil in the normal manner to afford all Members of the Oireachtas an opportunity to have an input into its development simply to ensure members of the public - the people affected by the legislation - would have an opportunity to have their representatives speak on their behalf.

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