Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I will make some general comments on the Bill, although I have no really strong opinions, one way or the other, on the merits of it. The Government has said it is important and addresses a real gap in legislation to deal with technical issues concerning the impact of Covid-19 on companies legislation. That is all well and good and I congratulate the Government on moving quickly to address this gap and dealing promptly with the difficulties facing companies during the Covid-19 pandemic. I also congratulate the Government on all the efforts made over the past few months with much difficult legislation, some of which was over 100 pages long and very complex. This proves that where there is a political will, there is a legislative way.

I submitted a very short amendment to this Bill that has been ruled out of order. A similar short amendment was submitted by Sinn Féin, borrowed from a Sinn Féin Bill languishing in a legislative graveyard since the end of the previous Dáil. It is not a complex amendment but it would have made a very real difference to many thousands of workers and their families. Workers in this country face a tsunami of redundancy in the coming months and thousands will be hit by insolvency and lay-offs. The amendment sought to give those workers some added protection and place workers ahead of debtors and creditors in an insolvency. However, such an act seems to be irrelevant to this House.

It is five years since the Clerys workers were victims of greed and a mugging by corporate thugs and four years since the publication of the Duffy Cahill report. That report did not explicitly recommend the reordering of preferential creditors but it covered in detail one measure that might give some comfort to workers facing a crisis like this in their lives. It recommended that workers should be put ahead of other creditors in other employment legislation. What have the Houses of the Oireachtas done with this since? Zilch, or absolutely nothing. Nadahas been done for the workers. There is no intention from Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael to put the interests of workers ahead of the interests of companies. Stripped of rhetoric, it is very clear those parties do not really give a damn.

Debenhams workers have been on strike for more than 110 days now, victims of a tactical insolvency. As one of those workers put it, this is a contrived situation. They are collateral damage in a war between a consortium of debtors, including our own Bank of Ireland, and immensely rich stakeholders. Assets, stocks and figures on balance sheets have been moved around like pieces on a chessboard while workers' lives and the lives of their families are being seriously damaged. These workers have given decades of service, helping to make millions of euro of profit for these companies and shareholders.

This is not a political priority for this Government, as it was not for the previous Government. Not in this Bill or any other legislation will workers in positions of contrived insolvency qualify as emergency cases. We fully support these workers and we know they will not go away and will continue their fight. We know that fight will be seen and their actions will make a difference for our workers. If we had an Oireachtas that cared about workers, their families and their lives, the amendment would have been allowed and we could discuss it in detail. It is a simple measure that could have helped to deal with those workers.

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