Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The former Debenhams workers should get the redundancy payments they were promised, in my view, but, as I understand it, most of these issues are now matters for the courts and none of us can interfere in that. It is dishonest to tell people that politicians can interfere in a court process when they cannot.

Let me restate what I said earlier about the pandemic unemployment payment. The Cabinet will meet tomorrow and make a decision on this. The assurance that I can give to the 500,000 or so people who are on the pandemic unemployment payment is that it will be extended for months, not for weeks, because this pandemic is not over yet. People who were working full-time before the pandemic happened will continue to get the €350 payment. Some people who are working part-time will have their payment reduced but it will still be more than they were getting before the pandemic, and that would include those Debenhams workers, so they will still be getting more than they got on a weekly basis in January or February.

What the Deputy is doing again is engaging in exactly that form of cynical, nasty populism - spreading untruths in order to make people angry, dividing the people from a perceived, invented elite, putting emotion over reason and peddling easy solutions to problems that are complex. It is fundamentally dishonest. It is not very different from what those on the far right do elsewhere.

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