Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I start by paying tribute to all the workers who are putting their health and lives on the line in the fight against the coronavirus. Above all, this includes everybody who works in the health service - the nurses, doctors, porters, cleaners, paramedics, care assistants and home care workers and many others.

It is also everybody who is engaged in essential work: the truck drivers bringing food to shops, the retail workers, the postal workers, the bin collectors, the pharmacy workers and the bus, Luas and train drivers bringing all those workers around.

The crisis is laying bare many realities about society. One of those is highlighting those who are essential workers. People can see in that list there are no CEOs, no hedge-fund managers, no senior bankers. The workers who are doing the essential work in our society on the ground are workers who are invariably substantially underpaid, undervalued and working in sectors that have been underfunded by successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments. For too long, our health workers have been underpaid and overworked. Their calls for improvement in staffing levels, hospital conditions and wages were met with shrugs by the Government. Now, when they have been called on they put their shoulders to the wheel and went beyond the call of duty. The same applies to the massively underpaid Defence Forces. It applies particularly to student nurses today who need to be paid immediately and all of this must not be forgotten when the crisis is over. Those workers are added to by all those workers who cannot go to work, who are making a huge effort to socially distance to protect themselves, their families and society at large, all the community groups that have been set up to help each other out and to drop food and supplies to older and vulnerable people and to help people who are self-isolating.

The very best of solidarity has been brought out in the vast majority of people. Unfortunately, their efforts are being undermined by a small minority, the non-essential companies that are still opening up, the call centres, the factories, the construction sites – stuff that is non-essential for the running of our society. They are putting their private profit before public health and endangering the health and lives not only of their workers but of people in the wider community. I have been inundated by calls in relation to this. I had a call yesterday from a guy about Heatons-Sports Direct asking part-time and casual workers to come in and do work, very evidently non-essential retail work. The Mandate trade union has done good work in highlighting it and in protecting the interests of retail workers. It must be shut down. The most blatant case of endangerment has been in the construction sector. Again, I have been inundated with calls. I was talking to a guy yesterday on a major site in Dublin who said, first, it is simply not possible to socially distance on big sites and, second, there is no hand sanitiser available on the sites. I got a message yesterday from Niall who says:

I really feel we construction workers are being thrown under the bus. I travel between 3/4 sites a day with a combined workforce of about 1500 on them. Social distancing is impossible. My wife is working from home my son is home from school then I go out all day and bring whatever I've been exposed to back into the house.

Please fight for us.

People should go onto Unite's Twitter account. It has been doing Trojan work in exposing picture after picture of construction sites. The CIF said yesterday that 200,000 people work in construction in this country. If up to half of them got infected and became ill, which is the percentage estimated by Paul Reid, and even if the current mortality rates of 0.6% in Ireland was applied to those workers, we are talking about 600 workers who could die as a consequence. That does not include the risks to other people that construction workers come into contact with. One could expand that out to factories. I have a message from Ger, a factory worker who says he suffers from asthma:

I work in a factory that is not essential and will not close unless told to.

I suffer from asthma and am living with my parents. My father would be high risk as he is over 60 and has underlying health conditions.

I couldn’t live with myself if I got infected and brought it home with me and god forbid passed it on to my parents.

So my query is can I refuse to go to work and if I do would I be eligible for the social welfare payment?

We need a clear direction from the Government to shut down all non-essential work. It is the only way it will stop. It is the only way to protect the lives and health of those workers and the wider society.

If that does not happen, workers will be left with no choice but to take similar action to which we have seen in the North in ABP Meats and in Moy Park where workers simply walked out and said they were not prepared to continue to work in unsafe conditions. We need action and direction from the Government now.

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