Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

-----are all run on the basis of contracting and freelance, or whatever we want to call this new world. While those arrangements might have been engaged in co-operatively between the employer and the employee, the State is losing money. It is not the Government that is losing out. People have said on a number of occasions today that the Government is losing money. It is not the Government; it is the State. When we sit down to deal with a social welfare Bill and try to fight over where this fiver or that fiver is going, it is those resources that are diminished.

There are things we genuinely want to do. I want to bring in penalisation measures and a new status and classification, perhaps called a "third worker". They might be a contractor or a freelancer, but they will have all the rights under employment legislation that an employee has today. Members already know that the track record of the last Government was to extend social insurance benefits to people who are genuinely self-employed, or not genuinely self-employed. Our record on this is earnest, albeit that Members might criticise it as too slow. We are going to get there.

I would love to be able to tell Deputy Brady that during the summer we will sit down and try to fix this and come back to the Seanad to amend it, but I will not be dishonest. If I do that, then this Bill is not going to see the Seanad this side of Christmas. I would like to remind all Members that what we have been doing for the past year, very thoroughly, as lots of the Members in this Chamber have pointed out, is that we have been trying to get the people who are working far more hours on a consistent basis, week in, week out, to be put on a banded hours contract that actually reflects the reality of how they are working so that they can go about living their financial lives in a more secure measure. We have actually been trying to ban if-and-when contracts for the past year and bring in penalisation measures so that people who are in those situations have the guts and self-confidence to take cases to the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, and know that they will win.

This Bill has been delayed long enough, partly because of me and partly because of filibustering. I will not make a commitment that will ensure that it will be delayed further. I was not trying to pass the buck earlier when I asked Deputy O'Dea to take out his amendment and put it as a stand-alone Bill. I said a million times in this House that there is no monopoly on wisdom. I have no problem supporting a Private Members' Bill from any part of the Opposition, whether it is from the smallest party like Solidarity-People Before Profit or the biggest party like Fianna Fáil. We all collectively want the same thing. I encourage Members to acknowledge that this Bill needs to get in and out of the Seanad and back here as quickly as possible, so that the people in Dunnes Stores, who we have been talking about for weeks, can actually get onto the banded hours contracts that they deserve to be on and get the employment rights that we have all been working on over the past year enshrined in legislation. On that basis, I will be voting against the amendment.

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