Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity)

It is regrettable the Minister is not here. There are very few debates or discussions on workers in this Dáil and he should be here. I particularly wanted to ask him - he should come back before the end of the debate - to apologise to workers for the insult he delivered to teachers, who are a huge section of the workforce in this country. He invited somebody who was basically an anti-union billionaire who insulted workers to launch his campaign. I have not heard an apology for that.

I was also amused to hear the lecture from Deputy Lahart on how great things were for workers right now. I do not think he ever visited the picket line for Debenhams workers at Tallaght the year it was on. This is the fifth anniversary of the commencement of the Debenhams strike. I will bring home some lessons on that. They were sacked by a multinational company via email. They fought during a global pandemic, without any great help from their union leadership, during a retail jobs massacre of their jobs. It then became a battle by hundreds of mainly women workers for their agreed redundancy payments. They fought for more than a year. They put up a huge battle. There were pickets to stop stock, which could have paid for their redundancy, being taken out of the shop. There were marches and occupations of shops at Henry Street and elsewhere in Dublin, Cork and Waterford. The picket was never breached in Limerick city, for example, as it got so much community support.

What a disgrace this State has delivered to those workers. The phone was never lifted by the then Minister to stop that company leaving the country. Nothing was done to help them. Then, on 7 March this year, the High Court overturned a meagre, pathetic award the workers were given for lack of consultation. The complaint they launched at the WRC, and the award that was originally granted to them, was challenged by privileged High Court judges who took away some compensation they would have got. It is absolutely disgraceful. These workers took a complaint under the Protection of Employment Act stating that they had not been notified or dealt with and given sufficient consultation, the whole purpose of which is to allow workers time to get together to discuss how to save their jobs. That never happened. The judges turned around and said they had no great hurt or hardship from that.

As well as calling out the clear bias of the courts system, I will raise the role of the liquidators and KPMG. I am sorry I am boring the Minister of State, but this is actually important. Opportunist liquidations have happened in this country previously. They happened at Clerys and others. Will the Government legislate to prevent it happening again? The Debenhams Bill is there. It was moved by my colleague, the former Deputy Mick Barry. It can easily be passed, even if the Government makes amendments to it. The Irish subsidiary of Debenhams was saddled with all the debt. It was an opportunist liquidation. We should prevent that happening again and put workers first in any future liquidation process. That Bill will go to the enterprise and trade committee, if the Government wishes it to. We need to say that this should not happen again. I note that the housing tsar will keep his salary but, in this country, the workers are always last.

I will also mention that we are now in a new phase of capitalism. Whatever Deputy Lahart thought about the past, reforms are gone now. We are getting into a tariff war where the aim of the broligarchy will be to make workers pay. We have billionaires at the helm in the White House. Workers' interests will be last, as they will unfortunately find out. There has been a shift of wealth to the top. The share of wealth by workers internationally has constantly gone down. In 2013, for example, it was 48% and in 2023 it was 32%. There is vast wealth but more and more of it is leaving workers. The trade union movement needs to make itself relevant again, to borrow from Donal Trump's phrase, and represent workers in this situation.

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