Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Government is asking us to vote confidence in the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment. The Government is asking us to accept his explanation for his behaviour in leaking a confidential document to a friend and head of a rival representative body, completely outside of normal procedure and appropriate practice, during a multi-million euro negotiation process.

The Labour Party told the Tánaiste to come clean, to tell the truth, to dispense with the incredible yarn he had been peddling and to apologise, and perhaps there may have been a way out for him. However, the Tánaiste chose not to do that. He persisted with the line that he was leaking the document for the good of the document, a statement that takes the entire country for fools. Then, his cheerleaders go on the public airwaves and repeat the same lines. One Minister even suggested that the word “confidential” was printed on the document for the benefit of Dr. Ó Tuathail. The question is not only should the Dáil have confidence in him, but should any trade union have confidence that they can negotiate with this Government in good faith, or should any Minister have confidence that they can share a confidential document with the Tánaiste in good faith. The fact is, in all honesty, they cannot.

We also have no confidence in the Minister because he has shown no interest in protecting the rights of workers throughout this pandemic. When sectoral pay agreements were struck down by the High Court, my colleague, Deputy Ged Nash, introduced emergency legislation to reinstate them, and the Tánaiste dismissed this move as “virtue signalling”. When the Labour Party introduced a statutory sick pay Bill, the Tánaiste and his Government colleagues kicked it down the road for six months. When ICTU walked out of the Low Pay Commission after it advocated a paltry 10 cent increase in the minimum wage, the Tánaiste accepted the increase without question. The same week, he humiliated a public official and NPHET on national television and dismissed their recommendation because they had not thought things through. The Debenhams workers and others have been screaming for the implementation of the Duffy Cahill report, to which he is clearly indifferent. We are quite sure the Bill we launched today on working from home and the right to switch off will be treated with similar disdain by the same Minister. So, we have no confidence in the Tánaiste. He is not a friend of the worker and now appears not to be a friend of transparent politics.

The Labour Party has spent generations championing ethics in public life. From freedom of information legislation and lobbying legislation to tackling corporate donations, Labour has worked tirelessly to clean up politics from the grubby dealings of others. Not one Labour politician has ever faced any accusation of improper behaviour at any tribunal of inquiry. Labour knows what it is like to have to run against Fianna Fáil money, to have to run against Fine Gael money and to have to run against Sinn Féin money. Sinn Féin now wants to present itself as the ethical left. It says it wants to stand against insider politics and the old boys' club. We in the Labour Party offer it some advice. It is not good enough to describe a convicted tax cheat as a good republican because he is a member of their old boys' club. It is not good enough to accept £4 million from England to fund political activity in Ireland and then to move it around so they do not have to pay tax on it. It is not good enough to take racist American money from bigoted Trump supporters like Congressman Pete King of New York, who was one of the architects of the Muslim ban, but who supports Sinn Féin - an insider, one of your old boys' club. It is not good enough to have the Northern Minister for Finance send documents of the renewable heat initiative to one of its own insiders and member of the old boys' club in Belfast before it got sign-off. Ethics in public life is important, not just when it is somebody else's old boys' club but when it is your own.

This debate suits both Sinn Féin and Fine Gael.

They want the public to think politics in Ireland is a choice between the Varadkar conservatives and populist nationalism. It is not. There are enough of us in this Chamber who want to focus on the dignity of the worker and the eradication of homelessness, poverty and Covid-19 and who value the liberation of education and the well-being of all our people. We will continue to work with others to bring honour and ethics to Irish politics. Despite often harsh words between us, we have confidence in many individuals and groupings in this Oireachtas. That confidence does not extend to the Tánaiste.

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