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

I am sharing time with Deputy Barry.

The wage subsidy scheme is a good scheme in principle, which tries to ensure that people who lost jobs and income as a result of the Covid-19 measures have a road back to employment, retain their relationship with their employment and have some sort of income support to sustain them through the very difficult period of the lockdown, when people, collectively and based on the principle that we are in it together, endured very significant hardship to protect our society from the virus. While it is correct to look to extend that scheme to protect people, his failure to provide support for particular sectors, namely, those hardest-hit by the measures taken to protect us from the pandemic, is destroying the solidarity that existed and threatens to undermine the principle that we are all in it together. This is a very dangerous thing to do when it is very likely that there will be a second wave of infections and further spikes. If there is a second wave and we have to call once again on people to come together and make sacrifices for the common good, the Minister will have done extreme damage to the goodwill of those who are being hung out to dry in the current situation, where he has started to dismantle the pandemic unemployment payment, PUP, support scheme without putting anything its place for particular groups.

The Minister can probably guess which groups I am talking about because I have been referring to them repeatedly for weeks. In the case of two of those sectors, I fought very hard to get their representatives in front of the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response, where they presented their case. However, it appears that the Government is just not listening and I do not understand why that is the case. The two groups are, first, people in the arts, music, live entertainment and the events sector and, second, taxi drivers. Both of these groups have been given no roadmap to full recovery of their incomes and they are being savaged by the cuts to the PUP. This morning alone, I had ten emails from taxi drivers who have had their payment cut. I am inundated, as I expect many Deputies are, by correspondence from musicians and others in the arts sector who have had their payments cut. I was able to get their representatives before the committee, where they explained their plight and begged, urged and appealed to the Government to provide them with an income subsidy until such time as the sectors in which they are employed fully recover. The Government has ignored them.

I appeal to the Minister to reconsider, even at this late stage, and to provide them with specific supports. Their requests are very reasonable and he could have met them in this Bill. I tried to submit amendments but encountered difficulties. The Opposition has bent over backwards to accommodate the Government by waiving pre-legislative scrutiny and allowing guillotines on all the Bills that need to be put through.

Some of the amendments I submitted earlier were refused because they were too late, even though I submitted them before Second Stage. That is unfair. It is not the Minister's fault but I appeal to him to address this matter, even at this late stage. If employers can get a wage subsidy, why can taxi drivers, who are their own employers, not get the same? Why can they not get an income subsidy when their business has collapsed by approximately 80%, which is much more than the required percentage to benefit from the wage subsidy that employers are getting? The Minister can ask any taxi driver who is going out looking for work at the moment. They are getting a fraction of the work, because their previous work was strongly linked to the sectors most hard hit, such as tourism, music, live entertainment, theatres and bars that are now closed. That was a significant volume of their work. It is now gone and they are, therefore, struggling. Taxi drivers have made a few requests, some of which do not even require money. They asked for a step-down income subsidy, which the Government could have put in this Bill; a moratorium on the further issuing of taxi licences, given that we have more taxis in this city than in New York city; the ten-year rule for replacing their cars to be changed to 15 years because of all the income they have lost; and to benefit from the restart schemes, from which they are being excluded. They still have fixed costs to cover such as insurance, paying taxi companies and other fixed costs, which were estimated in one recent report to be €11,000 a year. They are being denied even the €1,000 grant from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, never mind the €4,000 grant that is being given to other businesses. How is that fair? I ask the Minister to provide some support for these workers.

The Government's failure to support a particular cohort of taxi drivers is endangering lives and public health, because older taxi drivers aged over 66 did not get the PUP and continued to work during the pandemic, thus endangering their own health when they should have been cocooning. Many of them decided to stop working but are now being whipped back out to work when they do not feel safe doing so. That is unfair and it endangers the public health effort as well as those drivers' specific health. I appeal to the Minister to engage with these workers and to provide them with some supports until their sector, which has been decimated through no fault of their own, recovers.

Similarly, musicians, artists, crews and so on need some support for their sector as well. In many cases, they are not benefitting from the grants and their income supports have been cut due to the PUP cuts. I refer to people who play music in bars or bands that do weddings. There are restrictions on the number of people that can go to weddings, and fewer people are likely to get married in the current circumstances, so there is less work for them. There might be a bit of work available and they might get the odd gig, but it is nothing like it was previously. They need an income subsidy, which is a floor below which they will not go and which they can earn a bit on top of. That is the same principle the Government is applying to employers, so why can it not apply it to these sectors that have been especially hard hit? The Government should do that because its treatment of these workers contrasts with the way it is treating employers. Money is being thrown at employers liberally.

I assume the reason the Government will not give money to arts workers and taxi drivers is that it is afraid they will scam the system. When I asked earlier why the Government was not supporting them, the Taoiseach said that such supports were hard to administrate. That is code for the Government being afraid it will be scammed. This is the same impulse that led to the cuts in the PUP, the travel advice debacle and so on. Basically, the Government thinks that lower-income workers and the less well off are going to scam the system. That is the bias that is operating here, whereas we will throw billions of euro at big businesses and are not too worried about whether they might be scamming us. Many of those businesses are profitable. There are no provisions in this Bill to ensure that big businesses, which are making significant profits, are not ripping us off and taking advantage of the subsidy scheme. There is no scrutiny there and they are not excluded while others are. It is not fair. I appeal to the Minister to be fair, first, because fairness is important in and of itself but, second, because we are all in this together. The social solidarity we will need in the face of Covid-19 for the foreseeable future will be absolutely wrecked if the Government continues in this manner. Many of these workers have expressed a lot of anger and despair about this.

Finally, employers that are being given the subsidy should not get it unless they recognise trade unions. If they are guilty of collective redundancies, unilateral pay cuts or taking advantage of this wage subsidy, they should not get it. There should be conditions attached to big and profitable businesses benefitting from this subsidy to guarantee the rights of workers.

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