Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Taoiseach will be familiar with the phrase “One law for the rich and one law for the rest of us”. There is a perception that policing and enforcement is dealt with differently depending on whether you are dealing with workers and working people or dealing with the rich and the powerful. I urge the Taoiseach in this regard to watch “406 Days”, a film that has just been made, has won a number of awards, and that premiered at the Dublin Film Festival. It is about the Debenhams dispute and the 406 days where workers who had done nothing wrong had to strike and occupy to fight for the redundancy they were promised and denied by Debenhams, when the asset strippers who took over that company walked away with £315 million sterling. At the end of that dispute, which the film highlights in the most shocking way, there was an enormous simultaneous Garda mobilisation to break the occupations and strikes in Henry Street, Cork, Limerick, Tralee, Waterford and so on. It was a massive Garda mobilisation to assist the company and the liquidators to take out the goods and drag people away from the picket lines.

I went with the Debenhams workers a few weeks ago to the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement to give it information gathered by the makers of that film about the treatment, the tactical nature of the liquidation, and possible sharp practice by the company. In fact, it was definitely sharp practice, but possibly it was illegal practice. Interestingly, the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement thanked us for the information but said it would not be coming back to us on its investigation into that. Will the Taoiseach and the Government follow up on the matters we brought to the attention of the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement in terms of the shameful, possibly illegal, behaviour of the Debenhams group in terms of the treatment of the Debenhams workers?

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