Gerald Nash (Labour) | Oireachtas source

It is an issue bout which the Leader is enthusiastic. I am pleased to see that Fine Gael is not engaging expensive media monitoring firms because when I was on "The Pat Kenny Show" this morning, Senator Buttimer engaged by tweeting a very welcome comment. I acknowledge his role in terms of making Ireland a more equal society. I congratulate him on that and I hope we will have Government support for the legislation when it is introduced and debated here in January.

On more mundane matters, last Friday morning, staff at the SuperValu store in Drogheda showed up for work as normal but they were locked out of the premises and the doors were closed for good.Out of the blue, the company, which ran this particular store for more than 20 years, ceased trading. Almost 30 staff, some of whom worked there for almost 20 years, have been left without work this side of Christmas.

We know businesses fail every day. We all feel a sense of sorrow when businesses do fail and people are let go. Nobody puts more work into a business than the business owners themselves. However, this is a tragedy for everyone involved. When a firm is careering towards insolvency, is in difficult trading circumstances and ends up being liquidated, everyone will agree there are better ways to treat staff than to merely shut the door in their faces and leave them depending on statutory redundancy at the expense of the taxpayer. In a normal collective redundancy scenario where a business fails, there is a requirement on the employer to engage in a 30-day consultation process with employees to discuss enhanced redundancy packages and so on. No such requirement falls on a business owner where his or her business ceases trading and goes into liquidation. When the Drogheda SuperValus of this world decide they are going to close their doors, it is the State which is on the hook for the payments.

There is a solution to this. After the Clerys scandal, I worked closely to engage with experts to understand how the law could be changed to better protect workers in insolvency situations like that. The Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation has an expert report, the Duffy-Cahill review, on this. It was initiated by me and developed by Kevin Duffy, former chair of the Labour Court, and an expert company lawyer, Nessa Cahill, to identify ways in which workers could be better protected in scenarios like this. The Minister has been sitting on this report, however. The public consultation on the report has concluded, yet we see staff in SuperValu in Drogheda and Pumpkin Patch in Blanchardstown and Liffey Valley shopping centres experience the loss of their jobs last Friday as the doors of their companies were closed in their faces.

There is a better and fairer way of doing this. It is high time the Minister introduced legislation to give effect to the proposals in the Duffy-Cahill report to better protect workers in insolvency scenarios.