Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I, like others, commend the Bill and I look forward to the debate. The Bill allows trade unions access to the workplace to meet their members regarding official trade union business. I am at a loss as to why anyone would oppose such a reasonable proposition. It is not something that is in any way radical. It may have been seen as radical 100 years ago but I would have thought the idea of workers being organised in a modern Ireland was very much a positive thing. If we look at other jurisdictions, this is clearly working. It is about preventing, not encouraging, disputes. If there are people on the ground who can come into a workplace and resolve issues, that is a big plus.

We will probably hear tonight from some of the hard cases that it will not work. We will be given all sorts of excuses and told that it will somehow switch off multinationals coming to Ireland. I could give the same argument. Has it stopped multinationals coming to Australia, New Zealand and other jurisdictions around the world where there is legislation in place? No, it has not. That is a nonsense argument.

Again people will give examples of where it is going to cause problems for some employers. We are now told the economy is back on its feet and yet we see the difficulties, for instance, in the construction industry. If we look at what was happening there, we as a State turned a blind eye to what was going on in respect of these self-employed contracts that people were forced into and so on. There are huge problems facing workers.

People have mentioned different strikes and so on. IBEC said what a great employer Tesco is. Great employers, in my opinion, if there is a Labour Court decision against them, follow through on that, but we know that there are outstanding claims relating to the great employer Tesco at the moment. We know, of course, of other employers that are brought to the Labour Court every year and they just tear up those agreements. It is about workers' rights. It is about bringing about a fairer society. Why would we be opposed to that?

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