Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The situation at Debenhams has demonstrated yet again that the introduction of legislation providing for a hierarchy of creditors in the case of liquidation needs to be prioritised. We saw the same thing with Clerys, at which time such legislation was put forward in the Dáil. It is not acceptable that this situation is repeating itself. In the case of Debenhams, 2,000 staff, many of whom worked loyally for the company for two or three decades, are being dumped on the scrapheap. The company has used a series of what are essentially shell companies to siphon off its assets so that there is nothing left for the workers in the end. All that is left to those workers is the leverage they have over the assets in the stores, which, quite rightly in my opinion, they are saying they will not allow to leave the premises. It is not acceptable that workers should be treated like this by being put to the bottom of the queue as part of a cynical liquidation that was clearly pre-planned and orchestrated by Debenhams, with the Covid crisis giving the company cover to execute the plan. The evidence that it was pre-planned is that the company set up these subsidiaries in order to siphon off the assets. This is a company that continues to make profits through online trading and continues to operate in the UK and Ireland. Tackling that type of situation is the first thing the Tánaiste should do.

I reiterate the call made earlier by Deputy Bríd Smith and others for urgency of action in appealing the court decision on sectoral employment orders. It is completely unacceptable that the Dáil's decision to protect minimum standards of pay and conditions for workers should be struck down, with a possible undermining of conditions, often for very vulnerable workers among the hundreds of thousands of workers affected.

On the issue of supports, as colleagues from our group have already said, we are very much in favour of giving a lifeline to small enterprises that need such support.

I reiterate that the banks' treatment of many of these small businesses is unacceptable, particularly for the banks in which we have a stake. We should tell those banks to lay off and give holidays on loans and so on, and we should do something similar with insurance companies, as well as whatever support measures we are providing. It is critically important that we weed out the companies that are taking advantage of this situation or that are not taking up the schemes for other cynical reasons. For example, instead of taking up the wage subsidy scheme to keep their crew employed during the crisis, some film producers, which get a lot of money through the section 481 tax relief, terminated their employment. It is incredible that, when Government policy is to maintain the relationship between employer and worker, film producers in receipt of public money make a cynical decision to sack everybody rather than take up the wage subsidy scheme. The same applies to companies that do not pay tax in this country or are using the crisis as an excuse to cut pay. For example, Newspread delivers for Independent News and Media and its staff were working as essential front-line workers throughout the crisis but it has now cut the pay of its employees by 5%. That should not be allowed.

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