Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

----- are what were on display at the Dáil reform committee on the part of the Government last night. Why is that important? It is not just contempt, arrogance and the Government speaking out of both sides of its mouth that are a problem for the Opposition, but it is the mask slipping on a more general approach of the Government, which is about arrogance, contempt and speaking out of both sides of its mouth on precisely the issues we are trying to represent to the Tánaiste in here about the failure of his Government to address the problems faced by ordinary people. The contempt we saw on display last night mirrored the contempt and arrogance the Tánaiste displayed when he confronted a section 39 worker in Cork during the election campaign and was called out on it, and it goes on. Despite his pleadings afterwards, when he was made shamefaced by Charlotte Fallon about the despicable, arrogant, contemptuous treatment of section 39 workers who look after people with dementia and Parkinson's disease, people who have suffered strokes, people with disabilities and other vulnerable people, he continues to show that contempt such that thousands of those low-paid workers have had to ballot for industrial action because despite his squealings during the election, his Government still has not done right by those low-paid workers.

I was talking to one such worker today, who has, by the way, written to all the Ministers individually. He is a section 39 worker out in Ballymun. He has been working for years looking after the most vulnerable in our society. He is on a miserable €15 an hour and many of his colleagues are on €13. They suffered two pay cuts during the austerity period which were never restored. He has got a pay increase of about €1 per hour over a period of ten years but is still earning just above minimum wage and he does not enjoy parity with other people doing exactly the same job who are directly enployed by the HSE. The Government says it is going to do right by these workers. The Tánaiste said he heard what Charlotte Fallon was saying, but still the Government goes into the WRC - or sometimes, as Noel told me, does not bother going in - to give a firm commitment that there will be pay restoration and pay parity for section 39 workers-----

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