Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank Sinn Féin again for the second motion on this issue in seven months. Deputy Whitmore asked what the Minister is going to do if there is a full-out strike. What would that look like? I remember a full-out strike of the fire service in Dublin Airport in the late-1990s. The Ryanair baggage handlers had gone on strike and solidarity for them started to spread through every sector, starting with the shop workers of Aer Rianta, on to the airport police and, ultimately, to the firefighters in Dublin Airport. When the firefighters took a vote to come out in solidarity with the Ryanair baggage handlers, the airport shut down. An airport or anything else cannot be run safety without a fire service. That is how serious it is taken. The airport literally shut down. Within minutes, at nearly midnight, the Government under Fianna Fáil, intervened and began to try to sort it out. At least it intervened. They did not get full recognition but they got an outcome to that dispute at the time, because the firefighters and the action they took made Fianna Fáil and its Government sit up and realise they had better do something about this because they were not messing.

In regard to what retained firefights do, the Minister spoke about it quite eloquently earlier but it sounded like two different people speaking because on the one hand he eloquently put himself on their side and expressed solidarity, understanding and empathy, but on the other hand he put the knife in and turned it in terms of what they are trying to do. The one thing that strikes me is that every county in the State is desperately trying to recruit new firefighters because of the chronic shortfall, be it Wexford, Waterford or Sligo, and everybody can talk about his or her own area. However, this crisis is not new, and that is for sure. It is telling that the resources and supports are so low down the priority of this Government, that this service lurches from crisis to crisis.

Two years before they tragically died both Mark O'Shaughnessy and Brian Murray took part in a protest in Bray to highlight safety concerns around the under-staffing in the station. That was just two years before they were killed. It is still going on. Whenever we ask questions in this House, we are effectively told by Ministers and by the Taoiseach today that this is an issue for the relevant local authority or the CEO of the local authority. Technically, that is correct. However, the provision and resourcing of fire services cannot and should not be left to a disjointed and fractured system of accountability. It needs and deserves central Government planning, resourcing and oversight.

Passing the buck to 30 separate local authorities, when the crisis we are discussing is clearly nationwide and has new eminence that can only be addressed centrally, is no longer good enough. When we take the idea that retained firefighters must live within a certain distance of their station and be able to get there within five minutes, given the chronic housing and accommodation shortage that we face nationally, it is hardly surprising that the pool of potential firefighters is immediately reduced given the inability to access housing in many of the areas, towns and regions of the State.

I note the workers have voted by an astonishing majority to take action on this. Many of them feel a sort of desperation after years, or decades, of trying to get the State at both local and national levels to take note of this. I remind the Minister that he and his Government have the capacity to solve this dispute now and stop passing the buck to local authorities or anybody else. The Minister should accept the Sinn Féin motion, act on it and ensure local authorities have the resources they need to provide the services and treat workers with the respect they deserve.

I am struck by a number of things in the Minister's countermotion. As I said, this is the second motion the Dáil has debated on retained firefighters in seven months and the issue has been live for many years. We have known for many years that this was an issue Government needed to sort out. It was raised in the Dáil long before I was in it, and I am not in it that long. However, today, the Minister and the Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, keep repeating the same mantra we have heard for years that the public sector pay deal is so sacred it must not be upset. They say they would love to help but the public sector pay deal says "No". This is extraordinary because last year we stood with laboratory scientists and technicians who were also forced out on strike because they faced huge issues, glaring injustice and pay inequality. They were forced to take action against the health service and they were met with the same robotic rhetoric that the public sector pay deal says "No". The same was true of the nurses and the student nurses during Covid-19. They had to go out and protest. We were constantly told the Government could not deal with this and that it was not part of the public sector pay deal and that you cannot cherry pick one thing to deal with the other. This is the excuse being used to justify doing nothing.

However, if there is one lesson we can learn from this it is that one size does not fit all. It is shameful that a Government that negotiated a public sector pay deal should now use that to stop being responsible and acting responsibly for outstanding issues in key parts of that public sector.

In the Minister's countermotion, we see a shameful attempt to point the finger of blame at the workers themselves for this dispute, warning that the dispute has created a high-risk environment. It is the Government that has created a high-risk environment, and not the workers. I note also that we will now have two other fora, one overseen by Mr. David Begg and a separate one by Mr. Ultan Courtney. Let us hope that these deliver, but it is an elaborate and Byzantine process to resolve an issue the Minister could literally sort out overnight. With the political will to take this service seriously he could do that and treat these workers with the respect that they deserve. When I say that, I know everybody else is thinking that, of course, it could. It sorted out the banks when they collapsed overnight. When Fianna Fáil was in power the last time, overnight, it sorted out the banks and stepped in to bail them out. However, it never seems to be able to step in to bail out workers, even those who we need the most in our towns and cities and shame on it for not doing so on this occasion.

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