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

I am not sure about the level of interest in this motion in the editorial rooms of the corporate media. I do know that in many hard-pressed working-class communities across the State this will be seen as an important issue being debated. For example, in my constituency, Cork North-Central, thousands of people's lives have been improved by the quiet and painstaking work of local employment services and job club workers down through the years. It is not an exaggeration to say there are many people out there in our communities whose lives have been turned around by those workers.

The Government's plan has two key components. The first is to rip these services out of our communities. There are six local services in Cork, which will be replaced by just one centralised office. The second is to privatise the services. The Government can huff and puff all it likes about how the existing services can compete through the tender process, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. There have been four competitive tendering competitions to date; the private sector has won out in half of them.

In fact, the winners will tend to be not just private sector operators but big overseas private sector corporations who operate on a pure and unsentimental for-profit basis. Local employment services that do win tenders will only do so on the basis of cost-cutting, job losses and redundancies. Workers in the LES in Cork city have already been told as much.

The argument the Government has no choice in the matter and is bound by a European directive will only wash with people who came up the Liffey yesterday in a bubble. The legal advice provided by Arthur Cox that local employment services and job clubs cannot be considered external contractors in any sense by which that term is normally understood is compelling, given these services were fully integrated into FÁS and now the Department of Social Protection, and that has been the case for 25 years.

A Fine Gael pro-privatisation agenda is being pushed here. The fact it is being supported by both Fianna Fáil and the Green Party is testament to the fact that Fianna Fáil, a party that once had its ear to the ground in working-class communities, has lost it completely. The radical image previously portrayed by the Green Party has also fallen by the wayside. No faith can be placed in any of these parties. Faith can only be placed in the strength of the workers' fight and the support they win from the communities. The ballot for strike action in Offaly is a positive step. When workers throughout the country step up the pressure on the Government on this issue, they will have my full support and that of all the People Before Profit-Solidarity Deputies.

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