David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)

Both Ministers of State who spoke gave good impressions of Pontius Pilate. Both washed their hands of any responsibility when it comes to the safety of crew and fatigue management. You cannot outsource this to the Irish Aviation Authority. Yes, it is the regulator but the Government has political responsibility and it is letting down all those valuable search and rescue crew who have been raising fundamental issues in relation to how their time is clocked and reported by the authority.

I want to close this debate by bringing us back to what the motion is really about. This is not some technical argument about rostering, and it is not a narrow industrial relations matter. The motion goes to the heart of whether the State is allowing a vital emergency service to operate in a way that is incompatible with the law, that is unfair to workers and that is dangerous in the context of public safety. Search and rescue crews do not work in an office environment; they are front-line emergency responders and they are work 24-hour shifts because the public needs a 24-hour service.

Let us put some facts on the record. A standard 24-hour search and rescue shift includes six crew. Two duty engineers are recorded for the full 24 hours, and rightly so, but the two pilots and the two technical crew are recorded for only 16.5 hours. The Government seems to think that is fair. That difference is not illogical - it is indefensible. These are not different shifts; these are the same 24-hour duty periods with the same restrictions, the same requirement to remain at base or in nearby accommodation and the same obligation to respond immediately. If the engineers are working for 24 hours, then logic would say that the pilots and technical crew are also working 24 hours. The legal position, from my perspective, is clear: EU and Irish working-time law define working time to include on-duty call where the worker is required to be physically present at the workplace and ready to respond, and not anything else.

That brings me to what appears to be the mechanism used to under-record these hours. We are told that standby factoring is applied to duty crews who are already rostered on shift. Stand-by factoring is meant for periods where someone is off duty but available. It is not meant for people who are fully on duty, in uniform, restricted to base and required to respond without delay. The IAA is the competent authority. The CEO of the IAA should be dragged before as many Oireachtas committees as possible - including the transport committee and the public accounts committee - and the chief operations officer should be brought in with him to account for how they can stand over this. That will happen, and I want the committees involved to do as I suggest.

The Minister of State has some responsibility here. The Minister for Transport did not even bother to come in to take the debate. That shows the interest he has in this issue. Search and rescue crews have been watching the debate. They know, because they have been raising these issues for years, that the Government is simply not on their side. I am proud of all the Sinn Féin representatives and others in opposition who spoke in favour of the issues that those crews have been raising and that they want to be resolved.

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