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

The Government will have a fair amount of agreement across this House on the absolute necessity of this legislation. It is difficult to think that anybody will get up and speak against it in the sense that what we are dealing with, as Deputy O'Reilly put well, is a situation whereby employers are robbing the wages of workers. That is abhorrent to most, if not all, right-thinking people. It is absolutely necessary that we have legislation that protects and ensures that does not happen.

I will add my voice, as many others have, to the Trojan work that has been done by many people who have worked in this industry, and particularly to the unions, the ONE Galway movement, SIPTU, Unite and Mandate, and the work of my colleague, Senator Gavan, in ensuring that this was put top of the agenda and that we are in this position.

Many have spoken already about the fact that we are coming to the end of the Dáil session, we are dealing with a great deal of legislation and there is not necessarily the time we would like to deal with the amendments. It is fair to say there may be a number of gaps in this legislation and we need to ensure that those gaps are plugged because this is about protecting workers. We are talking about workers who are absolutely necessary to the economy. If we are talking about hospitality and the absolute importance of it to tourism and other sectors, we all will be aware of the difficulties being talked about within the industry in not being able to fill particular positions but a priority would be ensuring that the rights that workers have within this sector are guaranteed. We all will be aware of the difficulty and the lack of engagement by employers in relation to the joint labour committee, JLC, framework. We need to see that all those pieces are put together and that people have their rights in relation to overtime, paid breaks and all those other pieces that we all take as an absolute requirement.

We welcome the fact the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, will be able to deal with disputes in relation to breaches of this legislation. People should share electronic payments and we need to ensure we do this for cash payments because there is still a considerable number of people who would use cash to pay tips.

We welcome the fact that policies will have to be displayed and people will know, but we need to ensure that is absolutely enshrined. We need to ensure that if there are added bits, we all know exactly what is happening. We do not mind going into a restaurant and paying. I quite like the idea, as many people do, of tipping but that is where I am assured that the tip goes to the person who is putting the work in.

There is still a considerable amount of work to do in relation to collective bargaining and other workers' rights, but this is a piece of work we can do. We need to make sure we do not leave any gaps.

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