Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

-----a service for the Clerys workers that will enable them to access their entitlements regardless of the broader legal issues. Some very broad and deep legal issues are arising from the manner in which this insolvency was structured. I refer to the group structure of companies. The Deputy needs to be very careful with what he is suggesting. The use of group structures by companies in Ireland goes back practically forever - certainly back to the 1940s - in company law. There is nothing improper in having a group structure, but there is everything wrong - just as there is with tax avoidance, particularly aggressive tax avoidance - in manufacturing a situation which results in a company in the group apparently achieving a very significant price for the property part of the group, while leaving the operational side of the group, which employs the workers and the concessionaires, bereft and insolvent of funds. It is a very clever and aggressive scheme of company law planning. We have ways of addressing those issues in tax law. A number of issues are being addressed by the Revenue Commissioners at the moment. I want to make it clear that this process will have at least two parts. The message I want to send to people who have been working and giving great service in Clerys over many decades is that their redundancy payments, which are funded through the social insurance that has been willingly paid by them and by everyone else in this country, are secure. Unfortunately, these payments will be made at a minimum rate and not at the rate they might have got if the company had reached an agreement with the workers, which would have been right and proper in this case. I do not want the Deputy to sow doubts in people's minds that their payments are not secure.

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