For over a year, Debenhams workers waged a heroic struggle against the loss of their jobs and their treatment by their employer. In many respects, their struggle epitomised the treatment of some workers by some employers in the course of the pandemic. Yesterday, the Government announced that employees who had lost their job during Covid would now be able to seek redundancy and it announced a special payment to workers who have lost out on reckonable service as a consequence of the pandemic. The statement also said that the Government would take a flexible and discretionary approach to the granting of that payment.

I have two questions for the Minister. First, will the Debenhams workers, who were very seriously affected by the pandemic, be able to apply for and access the special payment? Second, can the Government act to ensure that the €3 million training fund that was agreed at the conclusion of that dispute is actually distributed?

I thank the Deputy for again raising the issue of the former Debenhams workers. I will look into the issue of that training fund because we have sanctioned it and the fund should be up and running to provide the support for people who want to return to work, if they have not already returned to work. The decision we made yesterday, I believe, is a fair one because it would be grossly unfair, having not allowed employees to trigger a redundancy claim for a period of 18 months, to then deny them that period as being reckonable when it comes to calculating their redundancy entitlements. I cannot comment on any particular case until I have all of the details but the very intention of what the Government announced was to address that situation because people were denied the right to claim redundancy because of the statutory position underpinned by Covid. That has now changed, we are allowing people to claim and the State is going to step up and provide the funding to ensure that reckonable period counts for their redundancy.