Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)

I am proud to stand here to discuss and remember what the Debenhams workers went through under this Government. I know people will say this is a new Government but Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were in the last Government. The Debenhams workers stood up for their rights for 406 days. Government TDs stood in the picket lines with them. I was there and those TDs spoke about what they were going to do. That went on for 406 days. Then the Garda was brought in to enforce the removal of stock. It was absolutely shameful. I talked to gardaí who did not want to be there and wanted to stand with the workers. That was the craziness of the situation; the gardaí wanted to be on the picket line with the workers because they know these people. They come from the same communities. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael allowed that to happen and allowed it to be enforced.

Here we are with legislation. Looking back, workers stood up when the Government failed to stand up. What happened to the Debenhams workers was nothing short of a disgrace. They were a group of low-paid workers, mainly women, who had to stand up and fight because the Government had failed for years to bring forward legislation to protect them. When it came to workers' rights, everyone else was ahead of them. What Debenhams did was corruption. It knew what it was doing. It stripped the Irish stores of their assets. The workers proved this. They went to KPMG with documentation and they went to court, but because of our legal system and the lack of legislation, they were sold down the river. Looking at workers' rights, I think of people such as Mary Manning, Joanne Delaney, Rosie Hackett and Carol Ann Bridgeman, Irish women who for generations led the way on workers' rights and for trade unionists and the right to stand up and fight when injustice is served.

It has taken this Government four years to bring this legislation forward. If Fine Gael had listened to the Supreme Court in 2018 when it found that Irish law did not adequately address informal insolvency, the Debenhams workers would have been saved from the pickets and the stress and trauma they experienced. I remember this happened during Covid. I remember being on Patrick Street and in Mahon Point, where we had to be 2 m apart. For 406 days, when the country was going through the Covid emergency, these workers were denied their rights. There should be recognition of what those workers have done.

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