Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Sorry, I did not interrupt anyone else. Beyond that, we stand behind that with statutory payments and we pay out. In the Debenhams case, €13 million has been paid out for all their entitlements. I know it does not completely deal with their further collective entitlements but on the statutory rights around holiday pay, workers pay, time in lieu it is all there, whatever their entitlements are, it is dealt with. Wages and salaries of employees are protected, holiday pay owed to employees and compensation and damages for uninsured accidents is also a priority. Sick and superannuation payments are all paid out. The Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection did get involved straight away and over €13 million has been processed and paid out.

The conversation is around enhanced agreements in companies. They happen regularly in many companies but there are arrangements between individual companies and individual employees. They are not statutorily recognised as yet. Deputy Barry Bill wants to do that. The concern is that nobody knows where that might end up because they are voluntary agreements between companies and their employees and they could agree any terms of employment. The taxpayer and the State for decades have recognised statutory entitlements and payouts and do protect employees. The conversation this morning gives the impression that they do not. If one wants to extend that statutory payments conversation, that is the one we should have and I am all for it. It is now about 20 years since an agreement was reached around the two weeks payout per year for redundancy, so yes let us have a conversation around that to see do we or should we collectively agree to enhance that or not. It would be timely to do that after 20 years.

However, I am not sure that the argument that we should recognise and pay out on all voluntary agreements is equal or fair on the taxpayer or anyone else who is owed money from a company in liquidation. We are happy to engage. The Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and ourselves have teased this out here at committee and everywhere else. We are bringing forward changes that reflect the overall review of this area which we believe go some way to strengthening the legislation, certainly to make people's options and entitlements more clear because I must say again they have been given wrong information. There has been a dishonest conversation around Debenhams from the very start which has been unfair to the workers. It was not the unions that did that, it was others. That has not helped anybody. I sat with them and went through this with the workers. I have told them that we will do our part, we will strengthen the legislation which we will and that is happening now.

People said it was an insult to offer €3 million. The Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and all our labour organisations and statutory authorities, including the chairman of the Labour Court, Kevin Foley, worked and engaged on this to see how we could stretch the involvement of Government and stretch the law as far as we possibly could do to find additional resources to assist. An extra €3 million was found to assist these workers with their future career plans, retraining, moving to a new career, adapting to technology, and an enhanced system of training, career guidance and engagement. That is something that happened in many other cases such as Dell in Limerick years ago, funded through a European globalisation fund. The State said we could assist. We could not, under the law, assist with the other payments which were a voluntary agreement.

It is wrong to continually come in here and say that Duffy Cahill would have prevented all this. I would ask anybody, including all those who spoke here for five minutes and left, to read through all the committee debates on this, read through the reports and listen to its authors who have never claimed that. Everyone believes themselves to be an authority on what that report says, but not its authors. The report has assisted us in our thinking and we have engaged with all our social partners and beyond this week to move on our recommendations and actions which will assist here. That is a commitment and honours the commitment in the programme for Government and the commitment given to Mandate and the Debenhams workers at our Department meeting as well.

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