Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I had not intended to speak on this, but when considering the issue of PPPs I was reminded of a man I represented when I worked as a full-time union organiser. The school he was a caretaker of was moving to a new premises which was being built under a PPP. The staff providing non-classroom based services - I would call them the support staff, but the company that was taking over called them ancillary staff - were supposed to transfer over to the new company or take redundancy. I have a fundamental difficulty with PPPs because there was no problem at all with the work of the support staff. In fact, there were queues of people lining up to tell us how brilliant they were at the work they did. The problem was with their terms and conditions, which were by no means gold-plated, fantastic conditions, but they were significantly better than what the new company was prepared to offer.

After I was elected I spoke briefly to one of the employees on the phone who had phoned to wish me well. He asked me, if I ever got the chance, to tell people in this House what PPPs are doing to ordinary people. I decided I would take that opportunity today. He was effectively forced out of his job when there was absolutely nothing wrong with how he worked. The school was very happy with him. The difficulty is that models such as PPPs are not compatible with decent terms and conditions for workers very often. Ideology comes into play a little bit. I do not believe there is anything wrong with having an ideological view; I make no apologies for it.

Private companies are responsible to their shareholders. Their job, role and function is to make a profit and to maximise that profit - to sweat their assets, be they people or buildings - whereas the job of the State is the provision of essential services, so the two are often not compatible. In the case of the caretaker working away, his terms and conditions, modest as they were, were simply not compatible with the race to the bottom that was being encouraged by the State and driven by the PPP company. I gave him a promise that if I ever got the opportunity, I would tell people about the impact.

There is less ideology in that and more practical experience. My experience of dealing with the outsourced companies is that they were hostile to trade unions and to decent terms and conditions for their workers. Their sole focus was on keeping their costs low and their profits high. This is the direction in which the State is driving workers' terms and conditions. The Government is doing the driving and, of course, the people in the passenger seat with the map would be its very best friends in Fianna Fáil, cheerleading for private companies and the private sector ahead of decent terms and conditions for public servants. As I said, the man I was representing was a public servant on very modest terms and conditions, but that could not be facilitated when the PPP came into being.

We have a difficulty with PPPs. As my colleague said, there is no evidence to suggest that they represent better value for money and we know they can very often be responsible for firing the starting pistol in the race to the bottom.

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