I move amendment No. 1:—
In line 14, to delete all words after "shall" to the end of the section and substitute "be deemed to have come into operation on the 1st April, 1952.
As the Bill stands it is provided that it shall not come into operation after it becomes an Act, until a day which the Minister shall appoint by Order. The reason we are moving this amendment is because this Bill is a somewhat unusual measure. It is in substitution for a previous measure which was alleged to have been defective in so far as securing for agricultural workers the right to a half-holiday was concerned. It has been admitted in debate here that the principle of the half-holiday for agricultural workers was accepted by the Oireachtas, and was written into the Statute Book by the previous measure. In our view, the amending Bill or repeal Bill now before the House should have in it some degree of retrospection in so far as the entitlement of the agricultural worker to a half-holiday is concerned, otherwise the intent of the Bill of 1950 will have been completely vitiated, and agricultural employers who are not providing an agricultural half-holiday for their workers, will have been, in fact, evading the law, and no step will have been taken by us in this measure to make them comply with what the law was.
We are further reinforced in that view by statements made last year and early in the present year to the effect that it was proposed to bring in this legislation at an early date. I need only refer as one instance of that to the Debates of the 29th April of this year as reported in Volume 131, No. 4, in which the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister, acting for the Minister, assured Deputy Mac Fheórais that the undertaking which the Minister had given some two months previously to the effect that this legislation would be introduced in one month's time would be carried out. It seems to us, therefore, no more than reasonable that the 1st April, 1952, should be the date on which this Bill should take effect and become operative. That is the purpose of the amendment and I think the House will agree, or should agree, that agricultural workers who have been deprived of this right by their employers, in flagrant violation of the law of the State, should be at least enabled by this Bill to claim retrospectively from those who employed them, the right to payment for the half-holidays which they were not allowed and which they should have been allowed.