Annie Hoey (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I ask Senators to please forgive me because I must leave this session a little early. I apologise to the Leas-Cathaoirleach and the Deputy Leader.

I am sure that we all saw the chaos generated by the Twitter layoffs at the weekend. Twitter laid off people, potentially unlawfully. The situation is still somewhat unclear, with employees in the Dublin office being let know of their redundancies via email. Some employees, a number of whom I know personally, tweeted that they had no access to their work emails and feared that they had been laid off. There was a really terrible lack of communication regarding the whole matter. I do not need to go into numbers, but we know that 50% of Twitter's employees have been laid off and that offices have been temporarily closed to prevent staff returning. In Ireland, staff are entitled to a 30-day consultation process even if there is no trade union. There is still legal uncertainty about the layoffs. An employee who lost their job at Twitter in Dublin noticed that their password had been changed overnight. In Ireland, it is a requirement that staff are given a formal written letter of redundancy, which Twitter failed to do. There have been conversations on the matter involving the Tánaiste. I would like to know what exactly the Government or the Tánaiste intend to do about this matter. It is no good offering platitudes in the media in respect of this matter. What is needed is firm action.

The second topic I want to discuss is the forthcoming World Cup in Qatar. Amnesty International has stated that significant human rights violations have occurred in Qatar in preparation for the World Cup and has called for workers to be compensated. It is stated that these workers have been housed in poverty-laden communities, often without access to basic amenities like running water, working sewerage infrastructure or electricity. These workers were expected to work for up to 18 hours a day with no day off during the week. It has been reported in The Guardianthat up to 6,500 migrant workers may have died in the country in the decade after it won the right to host the event. That is a serious number of deaths. Amnesty International and other organisations have said that there has been insufficient research into the thousands of deaths of those who worked in construction in the country over the past decade and the contribution that the extreme heat played in this. I need not even go into the perilous situation faced by the LGBT community in Qatar. Under the Qatari regime a cursory Google search will reveal the horrors that members of my community have been subjected to. I shall quote some words by a Nepalese worker who said:

You see, some families are in rented accommodation back home. Now for eight months if we don’t send any money, how would they live there? Their landlord is going to throw them out of their houses now. Right now they are somehow trying to make ends meet... That’s why we are asking the company, ‘it is ok if you don’t give us money, but please send us home’. We asked them to just return our passport and send us back.

It is an extremely serious situation over there. It is important to put on the record while we are gearing up for a global sporting event. It behoves us to be aware of the brutal regime that lies behind this event. Sport should be for all. Alas, it seems that this World Cup event cares little for the thousands of migrant workers who potentially died in its preparation or indeed the LGBTQIA people who are going to be hunted and tormented as happy football revellers descend upon Qatar.