Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

The Tánaiste is quite correct in saying that it is not the Soviet Union and it is a democracy. For workers, it feels like a dictatorship in the workplace. He can ask the childcare workers, 84% of whom do not have do not have an employer who pays in any sick pay, or the meat plant workers, 90% of whom, according to Migrant Rights Centre Ireland, do not have an employer who pays in any sick pay. We do not even know what the position is in the nursing homes.

Some 80% are privately owned and are under no obligation by law to have a sick pay scheme. Their representatives who appeared before the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response would not disclose how many of the homes operated a sick pay scheme. That is more like an economic dictatorship than an economic democracy.

I ask the Tánaiste to note that a mandatory employer sick pay scheme at 100% of wages for all workers is what working people will say is a proper sick pay scheme. I sincerely hope he is not going to try to split the difference between that and the kind of backward attitudes we saw represented in many of those submissions.

See this speech in context