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

I do not think the two things are the same, even though they sound similar. When this House passed the legislation that suspended the right of an employee to apply for redundancy once they had been furloughed for longer than four weeks, we knew that it was not a real furlough. We knew everybody was going to be off work for longer than four weeks because we had closed down the country for the good of all of our public health. It was not that we were taking away the right; we were just suspending it. If people need to claim it and they cannot do so until August, it will be backdated to when they really should have been made redundant. It was just to try to protect their jobs. It was not to pick one side over the other. However, the Deputy is right. That was done and it might even need to be extended because it runs out in the next couple of weeks and we do not know how quickly we are going to get to phase 5. We do need to start looking at making sure the State as well as employees are protected in any liquidation or insolvency. Forewarned is forearmed and, based on what we have learned in the past couple of weeks, we can certainly make sure that it does not happen to the State or employees again.

I will say again, as the Deputy has said, and this is not to be critical of anybody, it really bothered me that men and women were standing outside their shops in Cork, Galway, Limerick and Dublin and they were not allowed just to quietly protest their disgust at how they had been treated after years of service, just to establish their right to be treated with respect and dignity. I think we did them a disservice by treating them a second time the way they were treated on their protest.

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