Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

The request from myself and other Deputies for this Topical Issue debate was prompted by a briefing given by shop stewards from Cadbury's Coolock plant last Friday, which was attended by local representatives, including my colleague, Councillor Michael O'Brien. Contrary to the attitude expressed by the Minister at the meeting he had with Deputies and the attitude I presume will be expressed by the Government whereby it takes it as a given that these jobs will simply go and that it is simply a question of managing that situation, the workers' representatives correctly do not accept that as a given. They challenge the loss of those jobs in Coolock and I likewise would challenge the loss of jobs in Tallaght and Kerry.

No case is being made that the Coolock operation is loss making. It is simply a case of profit chasing and a race to the bottom. We have EU laws that require multinationals like Mondelez to engage in a negotiation process with the workforce when redundancies of a certain scale are underway but the negotiations that are taking place are far from genuine. The workers' representatives feel they are being deprived of both the information they need from the company about the performance of the plant and the resources needed to acquire independent expert advice to enable them to put forward a counter-proposal to safeguard the operation in Coolock. The Anti-Austerity Alliance and I support the workers' representatives' demands for that information and resources to help them in the negotiations.

Given Mondelez's past record, I feel that any proposal from the workers' side will not necessarily satisfy it if feels it can squeeze more profit elsewhere on the basis of lower pay, more intense work regimes and fewer protections for workers. That is the record of this company. This, therefore, begs the question about the model of recovery being pursued by the Government and the establishment in this country and the consequences of total dependence on the whims, caprices and profit chasing of multinational corporations. The skills and potential built up in these plants should not be allowed to go to waste regardless of the ridicule that such a notion would excite from the Government and other parts of this Chamber. We must put the idea of State enterprise, investment and worker-managed enterprise to protect jobs and as alternative model for economic development on the agenda.

See this speech in context