Séamus Healy (Tipperary South, Independent)

I welcome and strongly support the Trade Union Recognition Bill 2021. I compliment my colleagues in People Before Profit on bringing it forward.

Not only do I believe in the right of workers to join a trade union, but I also believe that employers should be obliged to recognise the union and negotiate with it on the pay and conditions of its members. I have been a proud trade unionist all my working life, during school holidays working in a meat factory, as a member if the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and as a farm worker on Bulmers apple farm. I was a member of the Federation of Rural Workers and as an employee of a local tannery, I was a member of the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers' Union.

From December 1971, when I started work as a clerical worker with Waterford County Council, I became a member of the Irish Local Government Officials Union, now called Fórsa, and served as a branch officer and activist for the next 30 years. I served on the national executive of that union and was chairperson of its health and welfare division when I worked with the South Eastern Health Board. I represented the union on Clonmel Trades and Labour Council and served as the council's president.

My family has a tradition of union membership and activism. My father, Jim Healy, was a founder of the Clonmel branch of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union in 1932, and his father before him, also called Jim Healy, was a union member at the turn of the 20th century when he worked as a carter with Murphy's Brewery in Clonmel and Thurles. My maternal grandfather, Patsy Meaney, was also a union member at the turn of the 20th century when he worked as a labourer with Clonmel Corporation Gas Company. My father-in-law was a branch officer with the Irish Union of Distributive Workers and Clerks and was condemned from the pulpit for leading a strike for better pay and conditions for members. As always, church authorities stood with the employers.

I strongly recommend union membership to all workers, especially young workers, at a time when casualisation, short-term and temporary employment are the order of the day. Unity is strength, and the trade union movement has won massive victories against all the odds, many of which we now take absolutely for granted. We won the eight-hour day - previously, workers worked for 14 hours in desperate conditions - the five-day week, public holidays, annual leave, pension and sick pay schemes and much more.

The trade union movement should go back to its roots and remember the example of the men and women of the 1913 Lock-out.

On this, the 109th anniversary of the Easter Rising, we should remember with pride the great trade unionist James Connolly, the 1916 leader executed 109 years ago last Monday in the Stonebreakers' Yard in Kilmainham Gaol by British crown forces, shot tied to a chair. Connolly's writings are as relevant today as ever. His book Labour in Irish Historyis a masterpiece. It is well worth reading and should be on the curriculum for our leaving certificate students.

Current Irish law entitles every worker to join a trade union but there is no obligation on an employer to recognise and negotiate with a union. It is at the whim of the employer to deal with the union or not. Trade union negotiated rates of pay and conditions are not only good for union members. Studies have shown that unionisation and trade union pay and conditions raise the wages and benefits of all workers.

This is a common-sense and reasonable Bill. It is important legislation which I fully support.

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