Marie Sherlock (Labour) | Oireachtas source

To follow that last contribution, the call from this House is that the Israeli basketball team should be called out and pulled out of the International Basketball Federation because the pressure on the players has been shocking. I wholeheartedly agree with Senator O'Donovan about the stance that many have rightly taken but it is not fair to put players in that awful situation.

I agree with Senator Marie Byrne on UHL. I have had a lot of personal experience with UHL over the last few months. While my personal experience over the past few days has been very positive and contrary to the numbers that are in the ED at the moment, there is a dysfunction at the heart of the hospital. A patient before Christmas who had to go to ICU from the dialysis unit was forced to stay in the ED for 12 hours simply because ED is the only gateway in ICU in the hospital.

The issue that I want to raise this morning concerns the platform workers directive. We had thought before Christmas that we would have, in 2024, a directive across EU member states that would be groundbreaking in the effort to combat bogus self-employment, and that it would provide transparency to those who work on platforms on how algorithms manage their performance, pay and the allocation of work.Importantly, it will provide for the rightful designation of these workers as employees rather than as bogusly self-employed. However, the Government, along with a number of other EU member states, just days before Christmas blocked the EU directive at a meeting of the European Council. We need to hear answers from the Minister of State, Deputy Richmond, and the Minister, Deputy Coveney, as to why the Government has taken this position. There were some vague positive noises last year that it would be supportive of this directive, but it has now left us all in a position where there are no protections for the most precarious of workers, namely, the 25 million platform workers throughout the European Union. The Government is one of those blockers and we need answers.