Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I commend all of the Debenhams workers who will be watching this debate today. They have been a shining light in the past 15 months of darkness and they have given many working people a fillip and a sense of solidarity. It has been a horrendous 15 months for everybody in Ireland and across the globe. Throughout summer, autumn, spring and winter, these workers stuck it out and stood together. Throughout a global pandemic, they wintered this one out in order that they and other workers can summer anywhere.

In years to come, the folklore of trade unionism and solidarity will look upon this strike as it did the anti-apartheid Dunnes Stores strike and the strike at the Clondalkin Paper Mill. That is a folklore of working people who stood up against their bosses with solidarity and support for their fellow workers now and in the future. This is a strike that challenged the concept of workers who gave their sweat and guile, that is, who gave their all, some of them for many decades, while at the same time a profitable company, Debenhams, let them down badly. At the heart of this strike is fair redundancy for decades of service to a company.

The strike will come to an end, as all strikes do. It will, probably, come to a conclusion in the next few weeks. Each worker will want a fair settlement, but they all also want to ensure that workers will never again find themselves in the situation of having to picket for a long time, be subject to police harassment and, sometimes, be maligned in the media. It is important to remember what this strike is about. It is about a fair settlement for workers who have given their all in terms of service, while at the same time they have been maligned not only by Debenhams but certain parts of the Government.

This strike is important. The Duffy Cahill report, like other reports in respect of which nothing has happened, has been placed on a shelf. There is a reason nothing ever happens. The Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael parties are the parties of the bosses. They are not on the side of workers. Regardless of what has been said by either party, they pay only lip service to workers. If they were on the side of workers, the Duffy Cahill report would have been implemented by now and it would have prevented what has happened in the last 15 months. That report should be implemented such that when this strike ends, the Debenhams workers will get a fair settlement for the work they have done over the last decade and this will never happen again.

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