Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

This debate is taking place in the National Convention Centre, in Dublin's north inner city. We are just down the road from Liberty Hall, the headquarters of James Connolly and Jim Larkin, and the locked out workers of 1913. We are a little more than a mile away from the scene of the world-famous Dunnes Stores anti-apartheid strike of the 1980s, and now we have another historic strike taking place here in Dublin's north inner city. Striking workers, overwhelmingly women, are picketing Debenhams stores at 11 separate locations across the country - in Cork, Tralee, Waterford, Galway, Limerick, Newbridge and Dublin, including here at the company's flagship store in Henry Street. There is no doubt that this is a historic strike. We have only to look at the timing. It is the first strike of the coronavirus era. In terms of the duration, it will be 15 full weeks tomorrow. This strike is a litmus test of how working people will be treated in the age of Covid-19.

I want to say at the outset that the motion put before the House tonight by Solidarity-People Before Profit is a very moderate one. A radical motion would call for the 11 stores or, at the very least, several of them, to be taken into public ownership to save jobs. Instead, this motion focuses on the redundancy issue and serves to support the demand of the workers themselves that they be paid four weeks per year of service rather than the bare statutory two weeks that is currently on the table. By the way, Debenhams workers have a collective agreement with the company, which is seven years old now, for four weeks. It is an implied condition of employment and it should have the legal force of a condition in a contract of employment.

In 2003, the Canadian professor and legal theorist, Joel Bakan, made a documentary movie called "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power". In that powerful anti-capitalist film, Bakan shows the eerie similarities between the personality of the modern-day corporation and the personality of a psychopath - callous disregard for the feelings of others, incapacity to maintain human relationships, deceitfulness, incapacity to experience guilt, etc. If Mr. Bakan ever decides to make a sequel, I would respectfully suggest that he might look no further than the case of Debenhams for his case study, a company which sacked its workers by email, stripped its Irish operation of all its assets, tried to do a moonlight flit and pay its workers nothing, and then reopened 122 stores across the water, keeping the extremely profitable online business going, and still refusing to pay its workers a single red cent.

This motion is not just about the role of Debenhams. It is also about the role of Government and the State. The House will be aware that the State has a 14% stake in Bank of Ireland and that Bank of Ireland is part of the consortium of banks which forced the closure of the 11 Irish stores. The State also has its liquidation laws, framed by Governments led by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, which fix the liquidation process and make it a rigged game, and force the workers down near the back of the payout queue. The workers understand full well that playing the liquidation game by the rules as they are laid down will in this instance leave them with nothing but the bare statutory minimum payments. That is why they are correctly and on the basis of a 97% strike mandate refusing to play by the rules of the game, blocking the removal of stock from the stores and taking the position that they will only allow stock leave when a just settlement is put in place for the workers. Where are we now? It is a Mexican stand-off. The liquidator cannot get the stock out of the shops and no end of threats, whether it be injunctions or anything else, will change that basic position.

This is a stalemate which I believe can only now be broken by Government intervention. The Government, led by the new Taoiseach, says there is very little it can do but it is contradicted by no less a source than the liquidator himself. Last Wednesday night, the RTÉ website published an article about the Debenhams dispute and in the article it quoted extensively from the liquidator. Among other statements he stated: "Unless the State voluntarily instructs the liquidator to allocate supplementary cash to the workers, there is nothing that can be done". To be clear, he is not saying that there is nothing that can be done. He is saying that there is one thing that can be done and one thing only, that is, for the State to give an instruction.

The State is owed many millions of euro from the liquidation process - €5 million for the Revenue, unpaid rates, etc. The State should use its leverage through Bank of Ireland to force a rethink on Debenhams UK about the four weeks' redundancy, but if it cannot succeed in doing that, the Government must then resolve the issue itself by issuing the necessary instruction. Furthermore, there must never again be a scandal such as that we see at Debenhams or the one we saw in Clerys just five years ago. Legislation is urgently needed to protect workers' rights in liquidation situations. Companies must be prevented from putting all their assets into one company, keeping it open and then, having split the company, putting all its losses into another and shutting it down. Companies must be prevented from going into liquidation during lockdowns and workers must no longer be put down near the back of the queue in a liquidation situation. Instead, they must be top of the list.

I made some points earlier about the corporate personality of Debenhams. I want to make a point about the personality of the Debenhams workers whom I have met and got to know over the past 15 weeks.

I have been an activist in the working class movement in this country for 40 years. My experience is that many of the best qualities and characteristics of working-class people emerge in times of collective struggle - determination to fight injustice, solidarity among those who have been robbed and a sense of humour. I have seen these qualities in abundance among the women on the Debenhams picket lines. I saw them in the workers on Henry Street who had done a night shift. They used their social media outlets to help a man who visited their picket line to find his son, who he said had fallen on hard times and gone missing in the inner city. They were successful in helping that man.

I have seen those qualities in the Debenhams workers in Cork. They made a marvellous gesture of solidarity with their fellow workers in Bangladesh, who have been cast aside and thrown into poverty by the company. The workers in Cork set up a fundraising campaign and raised more than €15,000 for those workers. I could go on. These women deserve fair play. They deserve justice. They deserve a clear-cut decision and a clear vote from Dáil Éireann with no ifs, ands, buts or amendments designed to wreck the motion. That is what they deserve when we debate this motion tonight and vote on it tomorrow evening.

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