Derek McDowell (Labour)

I express thanks to the Minister of State for taking on board much of the content of our amendment No. 35. There are four points in our rewriting of section 13, two of which the Minister of State has fully taken on board. The first relates to paid leave or paid absence from work for employee representatives. As the Minister set out, he has taken that on board and I thank him for that. The more substantial part of the amendment related to the setting out a process for redress in the event that an employee representative was penalised or bullied in some fashion. I am grateful to the Minister of State for also taking that on board.

There were two other points in this amendment in my name and that of Senator O'Toole, to which I assume he is less well inclined. One is the placing of an obligation on the Minister to specify the facilities that should be made available to employee representatives. It should go without saying that if a person is given a responsible position as an employee representative he or she should be given some facility whereby he or she can do the job. We were anxious to ensure that the position would not effectively become meaningless simply by being starved of resources or facilities to do the job. The way in which I chose to approach this was by proposing that the Minister would make regulations specifying the facilities that should be made available to the employee representative.

A second point, on which we had a lengthy discussion on Committee Stage, relates to whether the employee representative should be allowed to call on assistance. This question falls into two categories. In the first instance, and this would apply most often in companies which are already unionised, there is the question of whether an employee representative can call on the assistance of a professional union representative who would be more au fait with procedures. I argued on the previous occasion, and still do, that this facility should be open to an employee representative to use at his or her discretion. Furthermore, an employee representative should be entitled to call on people with accountancy or with other expertise which might be of use, for example, in interpreting information about the financial position of a company if it were to be tendered at a meeting. Rather than employee representatives going into a meeting with a blank canvass and little expertise, we considered it important that they should be entitled to call on whatever assistance and outside expertise they need.

I thank the Minister of State for having responded positively on two of the points. Between now and when the Bill gets a hearing in the other House he might give some thought to the other points.