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

We welcome this necessary legislation. There will be a need to strengthen some of the weaknesses on Committee Stage, and I hope there will be some element of cross-party co-operation in that regard.

In fairness to him, Deputy Ó Cathasaigh spoke about changing workforces and the changing nature of how things are. There is an awful lot of hope in this but we also have a large number of concerns about what will happen from the point of view of AI. We also have particular issues regarding to zero-hour contracts. We constantly push that people would have an absolute right to union representation, but we know at times that it can be very difficult to represent those workers on the absolute bottom rung of the ladder in private industry. They do not necessarily have the full set of protections.

This is not the first time I have spoken about issues relating to the film industry. The Taoiseach and others have spoken about support for a stakeholders' forum. This needs to be put in place to deal with the very specific problem relating to blackballing and other issues. It is an industry we all want to see flourish but the difficulty with it is that it operates like something from another time. For people to work somebody must make a phone call to them to make sure they are going to be there for every new operation put in place.

We welcome the Bill. Many people have raised the tactical liquidations that happened in Debenhams, Clerys and TalkTalk. These are the companies that brought the issue of collective redundancy into the public consciousness. We know the Bill will deal with certain amendments to the Companies Act. It will ensure that collective redundancies are subject to a 30-day notification period before they take effect where the employer is insolvent. It is a means of generally improving the quality and circulation of information to workers. There is also the establishment of the employment law review group on a statutory basis.

We all know the particular issues that have arisen here and the protections that workers did not have. They were absolutely screwed over in what were utterly unfair practices that were covered by law. This is a means of closing this off. In this sense we are all very supportive of it. There are particular issues. We have a criticism of the Bill that it makes no change to the principle of equality of creditors of equal standing. The Bill is moving matters in the right direction, but we need to make sure that we give full protection to those people who find themselves in terrible circumstances, or at least have done before this.

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