Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing my time with Deputy Mick Barry. If I ask questions, I am happy to have them answered in writing if I run out of time. I cannot believe the answer that Deputy Humphreys has just given to Deputy Catherine Murphy. It is outrageous. The Minister patronised her for a good section of the time by telling her that this document I am holding tells a person how to sneeze, how to distance, how to mask up and use PPE. We have been listening to that for eight weeks, and in the course of those eight weeks, many Deputies in this House have been inundated with complaints from workers about the lack of protocol and safety on their sites.

I asked the Minister at the beginning of this month for a list of the number of complaints to the Health and Safety Authority and the Minister told me there were 122. The Minister wrote to Deputy Paul Murphy yesterday and told him there were 200. In her answer, the Minister states that it has not been necessary for the Health and Safety Authority to carry out any physical inspections. How did it know if it did not perform inspections? Did it pick up the phone and ask the employer how it is getting on, and whether it knows about sneezing, masking, PPE and distancing? If the Minister asks me, that is what this document states.

We have all waited with bated breath for this, having asked the Minister what she is going to do about the lack of protocol at work. We got that document and it is what the Minister just said, and it is full of caveats. There are two parallel universes here. There is the world that workers live in and there is the world that the Minister, the Construction Industry Federation and IBEC live in-----

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