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

I do not accept lectures from the Labour Party about the vaccine. We are all responsible Deputies and we will ensure we promote the vaccine. I do not accept lectures from the same party that lectured us about water charges. Neither do I have huge criticism of the motion but I am glad to see that it mentions the student nurses and why they should be paid.

I want to raise more generally the idea that, as Winston Churchill famously said after the Second World War, never let a good crisis go to waste. When we google this expression, we find one business magazine gives the following explanation. "In challenging times one must question the accepted reality because things are going wrong, rapid answers are needed and the solution may well be found outside the usual compass." This has been what we have been doing since February or March, finding solutions outside the usual compass and passing legislation at rapid pace. This has included very extraordinary legislation that we would never have accepted in normal times.

We do not seem to be able to accept in normal times that a group of workers, all 1,200 of them, who were cast out of their jobs in an unusual way and unusual times by Debenhams, are now being told to go back to school. The settlement given to them last night to allow a fund of €3 million to re-educate them, give them career guidance and start their own businesses was the most insulting answer to the most proud group of working-class women I have ever met in my life. They are reeling at the idea that the Government could answer their 250 day struggle in this way. It would have escalated were we not in extraordinary times. There would have been marches of thousands of workers up to the Dáil every other day of the week were it not for the lockdown. This prevented the Debenhams workers being able to generalise their dispute to other groups of workers, such as the Arcadia workers who will be similarly impacted. This does matter and we have to raise it. In these extraordinary times, the Government could have gone outside the normal compass and allow the preferential creditors of Revenue and the Department of Social Protection to give the Debenhams workers their two plus two but, no, it is giving them €3 million to go back to school.

Tonight, we will be voting for some extraordinary legislation that is also being pushed through by never letting a good crisis go to waste. A total of €50 million will be transferred to Estonia and Denmark to buy fantasy energy that does not exist to acknowledge our failure to invest in renewable energies. The investment limited partnerships Bill on which we will be voting is allowing us to collude with the structures that will see massive tax evasion globally. We are speaking about trillions of dollars. However, we cannot find a measly €13 million to see the Debenhams workers have their full redundancy payment.

What we need to do take the €3 million the Government is offering to SOLAS which, by the way, outsources all of the education to private firms and is pushing up the cost of even getting a Safe Pass for a construction site and hand it over to the Debenhams workers to give them a Christmas after 250 days picketing and being treated in the most abysmal way. This is not because they were made redundant like many others but because their redundancy should have fallen within protective legislation that should have been implemented under the Duffy Cahill report but is still sitting on the desk of the Tánaiste and is not being given priority. This tells us difference between how the Government sees the very wealthy, elite and tiny 1% who control all of the finances-----

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