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

People Before Profit was not a latecomer to calling for mandatory quarantine or for a zero Covid strategy. We have been calling for this for months. Yesterday we saw that Ireland paid a very bitter price with 101 fatalities, a record number, for the Taoiseach's failure to embrace a coherent zero Covid strategy and to impose mandatory quarantine.

I now will address another chronic failure. It is ironic that the Taoiseach referred to workers in his justification for not imposing quarantine and zero Covid. Today is the 300th day of the dispute of the Debenhams workers. This is a group that the Taoiseach has very badly let down and who have been treated despicably by a company for whom they had worked for 20 or 30 years. They have fought an heroic battle to force Debenhams, and indeed to force the Government, to ensure the collective agreement they had for proper redundancies of two weeks statutory plus two weeks for all of those years worked would be honoured. The Government has abandoned them. The Government has insulted them with a €3 million retraining fund, which is just ridiculous. We also have 490 Arcadia workers in Top Shop and in many other stores who now face a similar situation. They have a similar agreement with Arcadia for two plus two weeks redundancy arrangements, and they are facing the prospect of getting only the statutory redundancy and their employers doing the same despicable thing that was done to Debenhams workers.

I want to know, even at this late stage, whether the Taoiseach is going to show the solidarity for workers he implied in his last contribution by, as a minimum, giving the €3 million retraining fund as a direct cash down payment on the two plus two that those workers are entitled to. Will the Taoiseach answer the question the workers have asked, and on which Mandate has written twice to him this month, although he has not even bothered to reply, about the precedent of the Irish Banking Resolution Corporation, IBRC? The Taoiseach said that we could not possibly bump the workers up the priority list of creditors in a liquidation. However, we have happened upon what happened in the case of the IBRC when there was a similar claim made at the time by the a previous Minister, Michael Noonan. It was discovered that €5.5 million had been put aside in IBRC in the wind up of Anglo Irish Bank, which was bailed out by the people, where they were given an enhanced redundancy arrangement. Guess who the liquidator was then? It was Kieran Wallace of KPMG, which also claims that we cannot do this. Even one of the Taoiseach's own spokespersons has spoken about a statutory fund to assist workers such as this who are shafted by employers and who do not get their proper redundancy.

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