People Before Profit was not a latecomer to calling for mandatory quarantine or for a zero Covid strategy. We have been calling for this for months. Yesterday we saw that Ireland paid a very bitter price with 101 fatalities, a record number, for the Taoiseach's failure to embrace a coherent zero Covid strategy and to impose mandatory quarantine.

I now will address another chronic failure. It is ironic that the Taoiseach referred to workers in his justification for not imposing quarantine and zero Covid. Today is the 300th day of the dispute of the Debenhams workers. This is a group that the Taoiseach has very badly let down and who have been treated despicably by a company for whom they had worked for 20 or 30 years. They have fought an heroic battle to force Debenhams, and indeed to force the Government, to ensure the collective agreement they had for proper redundancies of two weeks statutory plus two weeks for all of those years worked would be honoured. The Government has abandoned them. The Government has insulted them with a €3 million retraining fund, which is just ridiculous. We also have 490 Arcadia workers in Topshop and in many other stores who now face a similar situation. They have a similar agreement with Arcadia for two plus two weeks redundancy arrangements, and they are facing the prospect of getting only the statutory redundancy and their employers doing the same despicable thing that was done to Debenhams workers.

I want to know, even at this late stage, whether the Taoiseach is going to show the solidarity for workers he implied in his last contribution by, as a minimum, giving the €3 million retraining fund as a direct cash down payment on the two plus two that those workers are entitled to. Will the Taoiseach answer the question the workers have asked, and on which Mandate has written twice to him this month, although he has not even bothered to reply, about the precedent of the Irish Banking Resolution Corporation, IBRC? The Taoiseach said that we could not possibly bump the workers up the priority list of creditors in a liquidation. However, we have happened upon what happened in the case of the IBRC when there was a similar claim made at the time by the previous Minister, Michael Noonan. It was discovered that €5.5 million had been put aside in IBRC in the wind up of Anglo Irish Bank, which was bailed out by the people, where it was given an enhanced redundancy arrangement. Guess who the liquidator was then? It was Kieran Wallace of KPMG, which also claims that we cannot do this. Even one of the Taoiseach's own spokespersons has spoken about a statutory fund to assist workers such as this who are shafted by employers and who do not get their proper redundancy.

The Deputy's time is up.

Even at this late stage, on the 300th day of this dispute, will the Taoiseach do right by the Debenhams workers and the Arcadia workers?

I dispute the Deputy's assertion that the Government has not engaged on this issue. It has. I was very clear and honest in our presentation to the workers from the get go. Politically, others created expectations that were never going to be realised within the legal framework available to the Government. The Government is not responsible for the actions of the company. The company has treated the workers very badly. Government is the only party to this entire dispute that has actually fulfilled its obligations, and €13 million has been provided in direct Exchequer support to guarantee the employment rights for statutory redundancy. This gets dismissed by the Deputy and does not even get mentioned.

The State is the only player here that has stood up to its responsibilities. It then tried to see if it could do more within the legal framework available to it. We initiated and facilitated talks which were chaired by the chairman of the Labour Court, Mr. Kevin Foley. They concluded in December and he issued a report reflecting the outcome of that process. As a result of that process the Government said it would accept the recommendation to provide €3 million to support career guidance, training, education and business start-ups for former Debenhams workers.

Essentially, what the Deputy is saying is that we should just increase the statutory redundancy for every other liquidation that happens as the way out of this. That would facilitate rogue employers left, right and centre throughout the country to exploit the taxpayer forever in terms of liquidation processes and the employers not fulfilling their legal obligations to workers. Mr. Foley refers to the 2016 collective agreement in his report and states that "it is clear that the agreement has no legal application in 2020". Legally, the Government cannot just top-up redundancy payments from the Social Insurance Fund and the Deputy knows that. He knows the very real legal constraints on the Government, but he has chosen to ignore them and just label the Government as not caring and having no interest. These are false assertions. They are designed and articulated by the Deputy for political ends. That is how he engages in this situation.

In terms of other enterprises, we believe companies have obligations. They should fulfil their collective agreements with their employees - absolutely. From our perspective, the State is open to reviewing legislation with regard to giving further protections to workers and also to strengthen the situation for workers in the general workforce in any way we can.

First, my only interest is to see 1,000 Debenhams workers, who have gone through an extraordinary struggle and have been treated despicably, get the justice and fair redundancy they deserve. It is similar for the Arcadia Group's workers, another group of workers faced with the same situation because of the failure of this and successive Governments to address this abuse.

I put to the Taoiseach a concrete example. The Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, IBRC, which was bailed out by the people, put a €5.5 million fund of enhanced redundancy in place out of its assets so the workers who earned less than €120,000 could get enhanced redundancy. This was despite claims at the time by the Government, similar to this Government's claims, that it could not be done. The then Minister, Michael Noonan, said it could not be done, but it was done. It was done by the same liquidator that is telling Debenhams workers it cannot do it. The Taoiseach must answer that. Why can the Government not, in the particular context of Covid but also more generally, impose a levy on employers, such as a Covid levy or solidarity levy, to provide enhanced redundancy? By the way, the Debenhams workers paid for their redundancy. They paid €1 million per year for 20 or 30 years. They paid for it and they are owed that redundancy by the State.

The two situations are not comparable at all. No ex gratia payments were made by the Government in respect of the liquidation of IBRC.

The people bailed it out.

None was made by the State at all. The Deputy knows that the Debenhams liquidation is a court-supervised liquidation.

It was the Labour Court-----

It is one with which the Government could not interfere. The Oireachtas liquidated the IBRC in an all-night sitting. The Oireachtas did not liquidate Debenhams. There are fundamental differences and the Deputy knows it, but he is being populist in his presentation of the issues.

It was the Labour Court.

That is what he is doing and has been doing, with others, since the commencement of this dispute. I do not doubt the Deputy's sincerity about looking after the workers, but he also creates platforms to increase support for his movement. That is in a lot of the approaches he adopts.

Thank you, Taoiseach. Your time is up.

The Deputy seeks to apportion blame. The State is not a guilty party to this. It has upheld its obligations to the workers and, believe me, we tried everything we could within the law to support the workers in terms of facilitating arbitration and so forth. That is our position.