Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

An awful lot of what I am going to say has already been said. We all accept the absolute necessity of the Workplace Relations Commission and the vital work it does. We all know that this is the outworking of the Zalewski case in the Supreme Court. I have obviously mispronounced that name and I apologise for that. We need to make sure we do not impact on the operational ability of the WRC to carry out the work that needs to be done. It was mentioned in the House earlier that, during this period, we need these sort of accountability measures. During the Covid pandemic, there have definitely been companies and firms that have chosen not to waste a good crisis. We need to ensure that all the fundamentals are in place.

There are weaknesses across the board in our protections for workers. We need to review all of the legislation underpinning these and I will return to that point in a minute. I will also reiterate what Deputy O'Reilly said. I understand that there has been a significant amount of interaction between the Minister's officials and Deputy O'Reilly and her office with regard to the legislation she previously introduced on this matter. That is to be welcomed if it gets us further towards a solution. There is an issue with regard to publicity. We have all heard, both anecdotally and in people's actual cases, of people being afraid of it being put out publicly that they are troublemakers as employees.

This is not a case we can deal with. I accept that there may be companies which fear the reputational damage that can be done to them. That is to be welcomed but we need to ensure that those protections are in place.

I agree that employers who disregard the rights of employees, as ISME said, do a disservice to both employees and to good employers. We need to make sure we have all that is necessary to deal with this.

Unions and collective bargaining were mentioned. We have seen in recent years in redundancy negotiations, including in my constituency, cases where a number of people are put in an invidious situation and have to enter into negotiations with a top-tier squad from an American multinational. That is unfair. We need to look at all the rules and regulations and at the rights we need to afford people in the context of collective bargaining and the powers of unions to represent people who need it.

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