I wish to raise the matter of up to 400 Irish Life employees who have been out of work for over ten weeks. Not alone are they out of work, they are not in receipt of any payments apart from a stipend of £30 a week from their union. Most of them are married and have commitments, for example, mortgages, and most of them have children and the ongoing costly financial obligations that a family brings.
The Minister for Finance has a golden share retained in Irish Life which brings with it a moral imperative to directly intervene if things are going radically wrong, and they plainly are. I find it strange that yesterday we had the launch of an antipoverty strategy while at the same time a huge number of people have been out of work and are in receipt of only £30 a week. I have been engaging with the Minister for Enterprise and Employment about this matter for a very long time to get him to intervene and do something. It is fine to have strategies about everything, but the everyday strategy of the Government is to ignore the plight of this great number of people.
There must be a reason that number of people would stay out of work for so long. In previous times one Minister and then another made special arrangements for workers in Dunnes Stores and workers in the Irish Press. In particular regulations were drafted to enable those people to obtain social welfare benefits.
I am glad a Minister from the Department of Social Welfare is here to give me a direct response. I put it to him that in a country in which the Government says everybody is doing well, there are huge numbers who are not. In this case there are between 350 and 400 employees who have had only £30 a week to live on for the past ten weeks, people with homes, obligations and families. Can special arrangements and regulations be put in place to enable those employees to receive social welfare benefits to help them to keep body and soul together? In the wider governmental context, it is a disgrace that ten weeks have gone by and each Government Minister to whom I have addressed the issue has said that it is not his business, that he will not intervene or do anything, and these are Ministers in a Government supposedly committed to helping those in difficulty.