Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I am spokesperson on a variety of issues for my party, such as education, social protection and the arts. This is the first occasion on which I have seen a Minister being present for opening statements and then leaving the Chamber before the full Opposition has had a chance to engage. It debases parliamentary democracy. We have to be better than that and hold ourselves to a higher standard.

I will begin by highlighting some of the slogans that we used to convince ourselves that we were on the right track. Some of them were appropriate. When the pandemic began the slogan we used was: "We are all in this together". Some of the measures that were initiated suggested that this was the case. We introduced a pandemic unemployment payment of €350 per week. It is not an extraordinary amount, but it was enough to afford dignity to those who needed it and to ensure they could live their lives without experiencing or facing the anxiety of poverty. The temporary wage subsidy scheme was highly appropriate and reflective of the lessons we learned from the crash in 2008. It meant that workers could maintain a connection with their employment. It was a worthy time in dealing with the pandemic.

However, gradually darker clouds have set in and, suddenly, we are no longer all in this together. There are new slogans now. We are now being told that we must learn to live with the virus. Learning to live with the virus seems to be a way of acknowledging that somehow we have let go of it a little and we must live with it. Some of the workers and companies I have been talking to in the last ten days have said that while we are telling them to live with the virus, some of the measures and the fact that we are ignoring their calls suggest that we want them to live with the virus while experiencing anxiety and removing their wages and social protections. It is harsh, discriminatory and unfair. It means that some of the indigenous industries that we spent a long time building up over the last ten years are precariously placed.

I wish to give a voice to some of those industries and the different groups with whom I have had conversations over the last ten days. I will refer to two indigenous industries that are essential to our re-emergence from the Covid-19 pandemic. In referring to them I am mindful of a saying on a wall down the road in Westmoreland Street: "There is a good time coming. Be it ever so far away". When that good time comes, we will be relying on the events industry. That will be when we can go to concerts again and when we can dance and laugh with our friends. When that happens, it will not just be the person on the stage who we paid the ticket to see who will be the important factor in ensuring everything comes together, but the thousands of events industry workers. There are 35,000 people who make their living as freelance technicians, work in promotions, do the stage design and ensure that when a person gets on a stage to perform the sound is of a quality that everybody can hear. That industry is on its knees at present. It is struggling.

We made massive strides to ensure we protected our artistic community through a €20 million grant to the Arts Council fund. However, the arts industry could not survive without the people who were excluded from that fund. This has been raised several times tonight and since the industry first made its presentation to the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response in July, but nothing has happened. Eventually, in a post-pandemic world, if such a thing will exist, and I believe it will, we are going to need that industry. If it is to survive and be sustained, we must provide it with proper State support so its workers can afford to feed themselves, pay their bills and not be at risk of losing their homes. That is not their experience at present.

The other group that will be vital to how we live our lives when we emerge from this pandemic is the travel agents. Both industries have done a good job of talking to their public representatives because all of us are raising this tonight. However, let us not raise it in a way whereby once we say it in the Dáil it must be over with. It is frustrating that the senior Minister is not present to acknowledge the fact that when we raise these matters, we would like some action to result from it. There are 3,500 travel agents in this country and they are worth approximately €1.2 billion in turnover to our economy. That is money on which they pay tax. It comes back to us and we get to reinvest it. It is vital, but the industry has lost 90% to 95% of its income since the pandemic. That is probably more than any other industry. The travel agents are not asking to reopen or saying that they want to send people all over the world. They are saying that when we ask them to put their industry on hold, we should provide them with the appropriate safety net in terms of income and security that they can pay their rent and bills.

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That way, when we can eventually aspire to go on holiday again, we can make a booking with the Irish industry that has built itself up, rather than go to one of the international companies with which the Irish ones were already competing before the pandemic.

We cannot talk about travel agents without talking about other industries that are under threat. In the last few days I had the opportunity of meeting people from the Irish Aviation Authority, including workers such as baggage handlers and others who ensure we are all safe and looked after when we go to the airport. When they heard the slogan "We are all in this together", those workers responded by accepting a 20% cut to their wages and taking a four-day week. It was unfair that they had to do that but they stepped up because they were told that we were all in this together. That was phase 1 of that particular measure in the Irish Aviation Authority. As part of phase 2, those workers are now being told that their terms and conditions are being altered and that they will lose particular protections that they have always had, under the guise of the company having to make changes because of Covid-19. Many people are being forced out of that industry and if we lose it, it will be gone forever. Those workers have built up a wealth of experience and they need protections. In cases like that of Debenhams and others, industries are taking advantage of the pandemic and workers' hard-fought terms and conditions are being altered under the auspices of the pandemic. The Irish Aviation Authority is a semi-State body and the people involved in it are just using the pandemic as a way of undermining their workers. It is absolutely wrong. We are seeing it in Debenhams and elsewhere too.

I refer to living with the pandemic. St. Monica's nursing home is in my constituency and St. Mary's nursing home is just up the road on the south side. Workers who have built up those care homes and built relationships with elderly people in their time of need have now been told that they have been made redundant and they do not have any access to appropriate measures. The Sisters of Charity, if one can believe that name, has washed its hands of them and said it cannot pay them. This industry is really important. It provides care to our older people when they are most vulnerable. Those workers are gone and it seems we have just let them go. That is totally inappropriate.

We could sit here all night and talk about the industries that are being impacted, such as the taxi industry. These are statements on protecting jobs. Has a bigger statement been made than the taxi drivers taking to the street yesterday in their thousands and demonstrating what would happen if they removed their labour? Again, to protect them, they need income support. We have asked them to put their livelihoods on hold in many ways. A percentage of their income has been drastically cut. They have lost the tech industries and the wet pubs, from which they ferry people around. All they are asking for is an appropriate payment, until such a time as they can recommence their labour and once again step in for the entirely unsatisfactory standard of public transport in this city. Yet, they are being ignored. I guarantee they will not be ignored for too long. They are working with my colleague across the Chamber. They will be back out on the streets and it is highly appropriate that we look after them.

We cannot separate protecting workers, or what the Taoiseach referred to earlier as a job providing "a sense of self-worth and well-being", from the societal provisions we need to offer our workers. We were all elected in February and the concerns at that time were access to housing and childcare and an inability to pay for healthcare. These same workers went out and voted for change back in February. Many of them were told that we were living in an Ireland of full employment and that that was great. If the only ambition of our Government and Parliament is to recalibrate back to January 2020 and look for an Ireland of full employment, then we are failing and missing an opportunity, because that Ireland of full employment was backed up by 160,000 workers living in poverty or precarious housing conditions. Let us be ambitious for our workers and acknowledge and protect those who have been left behind, of whom there are thousands. We rely on the workers who built indigenous industries that are the envy of the world in certain sectors. Let us be entirely ambitious for them and no longer lie or use the figure of full employment when those people are suffering.

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