Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left) | Oireachtas source

I find it incredibly ironic that a couple of weeks ago those in government were falling over themselves on the Government benches to express their solidarity with Dunnes Stores workers and their horror about the repressive and anti-worker onslaught of the Heffernan family. Yet here we are today with the Government playing the role of Margaret Heffernan in a battle against the country's bus workers. The Government can dress it up any way it wishes. It can try to hide behind the Minister for Transport, Deputy Donohoe, and Eoin O'Duffy's descendants sitting behind the Minister, but the reality is that there is a huge significance in the fact that these workers will be involved in industrial action and protest action on May Day, international workers day, against a decision made by a Government made up of the party founded by James Connolly to defend workers' interests. How far ye have travelled.

Let us be clear. No worker ever wants to go on strike. These bus workers are making a stand not just to defend their terms and conditions but to make a stand against privatisation and in defence of public services. In recent weeks we have had to listen to Government representatives trying to persuade them that this is not about privatisation but about competitive tendering. Guess what? They called it competitive tendering and franchising in Britain but it still ended up with British Rail being handed over to private companies, with prices and subsidies rising and big payouts to shareholders.

The Government has tried to persuade us that it is not its fault and that Fianna Fáil started it. It is right. It certainly did, but the reason this Government is in power is because people thought it would be different, not that it would carry on what Fianna Fáil had started. It has also said it is the fault of the European Union but there is nothing in the EU directive of 2007 which demands competitive tendering. In fact, it specifically states the Government does not have to have it so it should stop trying to con people. Nobody is falling for it.

I ask the Minister and his Government to stop blaming Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann workers for what is going on. How could any right thinking worker believe statements from the Government that their terms and conditions will be protected and that they will not have to transfer when they know that their colleagues in Team Aer Lingus, for example, had not only commitments but significant and supposedly legally binding letters of guarantee that would not happen to them, but it did? How could these people believe the press statements from the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, that their pensions will be maintained when their colleagues from the DAA and Aer Lingus will be assembling in their hundreds tomorrow outside the Aer Lingus annual general meeting because their retirement pensions have been decimated? Would the Government not just come clean and admit that what is going on here is a classic situation that Noam Chomsky described as the standard technique of privatisation - "defund, make sure things don't work, get people angry ... [and then] hand it over to private capital".

See this speech in context