Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is great to see the Acting Leader, Senator Conway, in the chair. I wish to raise the issue of the care sector. It came up at the enterprise committee yesterday. We had an IBEC presentation which was quite good. It has a good report out entitled Better Care, Better Business. It talks about the need to address supports for those in need of care and for carers and indeed the need to address recruitment and retention in the care sector. However, when I started speaking to the witnesses in the committee, they were loath to admit that low pay is a key issue in terms of the problems throughout the care sector. They did acknowledge, however, that if you are going to hire private home help from one of the for-profit agencies, the rate of pay currently is around €13.10 an hour. I ask Members to think about that for a moment. Any of us who have been involved in getting home help for our loved ones knows it is a really challenging role. It is hard and demanding work and requires a really good skill set to get the job done, yet the rate of pay right now for those workers is €13.10 an hour. I imagine no one here thinks that is an adequate rate of pay. I would certainly hope that is the case.

I then pointed out to IBEC that one of the problems is its members refuse to negotiate with trade unions. This is at the heart of the problem. How does a home help worker or a person working in a nursing home get a pay rise? Their employers will not recognise the fact they are in a trade union and will not negotiate with a trade union. That is why these workers are left on an appallingly low rate of pay. Those low rates of pay exist throughout the private care sector.

The issue stemming from that, and this is the issue on which I am calling for a debate, is the EU adequate minimum wages directive. One of the key calls in that directive is to increase collective bargaining coverage. The aim is to get that up to about 80%. We are nowhere near that at the minute. We are somewhere around 15% in the private sector, frankly, and that leaves us far behind the rest of Europe. The problem is that this Government is doing nothing in respect of that EU minimum wage directive. It is due to be in place this year. It is certainly not going to be in place this year. A report from the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, which is on its website this week, tells us there is little or no progress in terms of talks or negotiations on the issue.

As we head into, most likely, a general election in the autumn, we are still one of the countries with no right to collective bargaining, which puts us completely out of kilter with the rest of Europe. It is a huge failing, not just of this Government, but of successive governments. The implication of that failing is that the workers I am talking about in the care sector, workers on €13.10 an hour, have no means of getting a pay rise. Surely none of us should be willing to stand for that. I am calling for an urgent debate on the issue of collective bargaining and tackling low pay throughout our economy.