When, at the request of SIPTU, Deputy Moynihan-Cronin and I arranged a meeting to discuss the future of the Great Southern Hotels and invited Deputies and Senators, about 11 of whom attended, I felt a sense of déjà vu. I grappled with the question of the future of the Great Southern Hotels group in the 1970s and 1980s and now here we are again, in 1999, discussing the future of the Great Southern Hotels group. I had hoped the Minister would have remained in earshot so that I could confirm for her the position of my party. My party supports the three clear SIPTU demands – that the hotel group remain a single entity and that there be security of employment, within a State structure. I have no difficulty in acknowledging the position taken by Deputy Yates which is a considerable advance towards the position I have enunciated. It would be wrong of me not to welcome that but it needs to take a further step forward and place the hotel group where it should be – within a State structure.
While the Minister spoke with great sincerity about her pleasant days in the various hotels in the hotel group and enjoyed the ambience and philosophically informed service that she received from the staff, the last thing that they want at this stage is a further debate about uncertainty. I recall the decision in 1987 to offer the hotels for sale. I was a Member of the other House at the time. The election literature that I printed that year contained a large section about the hotels. It was proposed to retain the downstairs section of the wonderful Great Southern Hotel in Eyre Square, Galway and turn the upstairs bedrooms into offices. When I discussed this recently with the chief executive of the group he said that that was history and that they were just local businessmen. The sale of previous Great Southern hotels was a disaster and the price at which they were sold was close enough to an immoral scandal.
The case that has frequently been made is bogus. This discussion is not assisted in any way by the crude statements of the chairman of Aer Rianta on television in which he reduced the argument to what is the State doing making beds and serving meals at the end of the 1990s. Nobody but an anti-State ideologue could make such a remark. The reality is simple.
The expansion of the hotel industry in terms of employment creation through an advance in the tourism industry has been referred to. There is another figure that has not been mentioned. Approximately 46 per cent of those involved in the industry undergo training in their own time and at their own expense. The comparative figures for the contribution of the State and private sector to training were given. They make interesting reading.
The issue is simple. The Great Southern hotels have an increased asset value and a trading profit. Not only do they provide training they also provide quality management, including quality chefs who have been in kitchens at all grades. Where is the evidence that the quality training necessary not just for the group but for the future of the hotel industry is provided elsewhere? When I put this question to the chief executive, Mr. McKeown, with whom I had an informative meeting, he replied that things have changed in the hotel industry. They have not in relation to the facilities available for training across the sector. Improvements have been made but there is nothing that can match the training now provided. Other than for ideological reasons, why would one want to wreck the flagship of the industry?
It has been suggested that this has to be done in the name of inevitable change. This is an untruth. There is nothing in any EU directive or treaty which requires the breakup of the group because the State has an interest in it. One can find models across the European Union of state and semi-state groups involved in the hotel industry. Some of the better ones provide training. It is nonsense to suggest, therefore, that this has to happen.
Far be it from me, as a member, to stand in the Minister's way in consulting SIPTU but as the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, Deputy de Valera, Deputy Daly or any of the other Government Deputies present at the meeting last Wednesday could tell her, its members are clear on what they want – security of employment and conditions, the hotel group to continue its success story within a State structure to ensure quality training is available in the industry.
There is no need for confusion. To assist the conversation which will take place on Thursday, there is a difference between going into talks at which everything is on the table and having talks which are based on the assumption that the hotel group is to be separated from Aer Rianta and at which one will be asked how one feels about the various options. That is what is on offer from the Minister. If she had said that she was taking the proposal in relation to exiting or being thrown out of Aer Rianta off the table and would start from scratch about the future of the group, the position would be different.
The Minister said that she was discussing with the Minister for Finance the Government's response to the consultancy report on Aer Rianta. One would not need a PhD to deconstruct that remark. The report which was presented in considerable detail by the Minister did not acknowledge the importance of the contribution of the Great Southern Hotels Group to training.
Fianna Fáil goes through phases where it states that all it is doing is listening. In Opposition it states that the Government is not listening and everybody is whispering but when all the listening and whispering is over one has to listen to those with something to say. They were people like, for example, the senior chef who was perhaps one of the strongest people who spoke about the staff who came through the kitchen. He spoke about where they are now and how standards in other places have depended on the standard to which the young person was exposed, the scale of the operation which was able to carry the level of training and the fact it was willing to lend itself to the State training structure through CERT. If people want to tell me this is all available elsewhere, I will certainly be open to hearing that.
I do not want to talk about groups, but I suppose I am required to do so. If one talks about Ryan's, Jury's or Doyle's, one cannot compare their training capacity with the Great Southern Hotel Group's capacity. Here is what is at stake. We have something which has international acclamation. The Minister, her partner and others speak lovingly of their experience on their way to primitive villages and of coming back feeling resuscitated after calling in. That is all right, but the fact is that the Great Southern Hotel Group is working. Why break it up for the narrowest and daftest ideological reasons?
One comes then to the other issue in the report on Aer Rianta which I am as well able to read as anybody else. If Aer Rianta wants to buy, let us say, Rome Airport, building the hotel in Cork, which the Great Southern Hotel Group wants to do, as well as refurbishing its hotels, as it needs to do, as a set of capital requirements, has to go into competition with Rome Airport. One can see the argument for taking the hotel group from one State setting to another. What one cannot say, however, is that because the airport facilities group wishes to borrow for mainstream core airport expansion activity, it automatically means it can shed other parts it has acquired below capital cost and simply say it will use the yield from this as a drop in the ocean towards what it really wants when its borrowing requirement is lifted for its other activities. That is just callous in relation to the question of the hotel group.
The hotel group in its own State structure has asset value, trade and human capital sufficient to be able to justify borrowings of a considerable level which would enable it to carry out refurbishment work and to build a hotel in Cork. If it is the case that it is an anti-State thing, people should be up front about it. If people want to say, as the chairman of Aer Rianta did, that they want to take the State out of the hotel industry, it is better if it is said openly rather than being said in a covert fashion. I want to say bluntly, however, may God help us in relation to what would have been the Irish tourism and hotel industry yesterday, today and tomorrow had we not had the Great Southern Hotel Group, the standards it made possible and if we had had to rely on the many people who paid slave wages in appalling unorganised conditions in one venue after another across the country. It is not to anybody's credit that of those who go on day release to do training courses, 46 per cent have to go in their own time and pay for it themselves. It is to that wonderful chaos of the marketplace that the Great Southern Hotel Group would go.
The motion stops short of the step I would take. It asks something the Minister will not even concede. She will not concede the group can hold together, that the State should ever have a stake or share or concede in relation to employee participation. She justifies it all on the basis that the meeting with SIPTU did not take place last week and is taking place this week. Frankly, I find that rather unconvincing. We really need to know where we stand in this matter.
It will be for the stuff of novels to write about the rather Boucicault commitments of Deputy Healy-Rae in Kerry who said that not only was he delivering his own vote, but the vote of several other Independents in order to keep the hotels. I am sure he was carried shoulder high for a brief moment. I wonder what will happen when we come to the end of the debate at 8.30 p.m. tomorrow. Far from leaving the hotel group in the State structure, he is not even willing to vote for the hotel group staying together or for employee involvement in the future of the hotel.
It is time all that old guff was stopped. It is time we stopped interfering with something which is working very well. It is time for the people who say they have had wonderful experiences, as I and my family have had in different Great Southern Hotels, to respect the rights of these workers. I heard the young woman, who is the shop steward at the Dublin hotel, explain, as the personnel management might, how pleased she was that they are booked out every day and that they are continually busy, yet her colleagues can simply say all that is put at risk by this cloud of uncertainty that is regularly delivered over the future of the group. This is unnecessary.
There is a type of bootboy privatisation element in that one has to kick something into the private sector every month or so to be in Government. There is something people should know. We should look at the history of the hotel industry and this group, the amount of money which has been drawn down from Europe and from the Exchequer and invested in something which was clearly an investment in the sector and industry and which had good results. People were not investing in an asset which could be held for a while by Aer Rianta and then floated off into the private sector. That was not the intention behind that money which was spent on improving standards and training.
I said very clearly where my party stands in this matter – it is not a new position. I find it rather sad that we have to go back to this position again and again. I deplore a type of attrition I detect in the talks which are on offer in the amendment to the motion. The suggestion is that one can defeat everything by saying one's door is always open. The door is always open and the talks are always next week as long as one talks on certain terms. That is what the amendment says and why it is such an evasive disaster.
In all the circumstances, therefore, I have no hesitation saying that nobody in their right mind who is serious about any worker at any level in any Great Southern Hotel could possibly vote for the amendment. For those of us who believe a significant step is being taken, all I say is that I hope between now and the end of this debate we will see the hotel group securely where it belongs, with investment, security of employment, together and performing well and also within the State structure. We will have taken a very significant step away from the position which regards the State as being somehow inimical to anything which is successful. The State gave us the training which gave us the industry and the quality which has defined the Irish tourism industry. It seems criminal to yet again put it at risk.
