Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Earlier, when we were discussing the striking down by the courts of the sectoral employment order, SEO, the Tánaiste confirmed that those who were engaged on Government contracts would honour the terms of the SEO. We know that the Government knows how to respect workers' rights. The question is whether it is going to use the power it has to enforce them. I ask the Minister of State to imagine for a moment that he is a worker with an outstanding award from the Labour Court. Such awards are rarely legally binding and are often modest. It is a slap in the face for workers on low incomes who are awaiting payment of Labour Court awards to find their employers are in receipt of grants or special funding from the Government. For many of those workers, their employers have simply walked away. Would that Labour Court recommendations were legally binding but they are not, or very rarely are. If a worker is a trade union member, he or she then has the opportunity to take industrial action in support of that decision, but that is a large undertaking, particularly for people who have just been out of work. I ask the Minister of State to consider stitching in a mechanism that ensures the third-party mechanism of the State is respected. I also ask that he adheres to the principle, to which the Tánaiste alluded earlier, that when the State spends money, it will spend it where workers' rights are protected.

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