Labour seeks clarity on why employees are being called into offices

The Labour Party has called on the Government to find out why so many companies in the State are compelling their employees to come into work when the Covid crisis is at its peak.

Labour leader Alan Kelly said on Tuesday there was far more traffic on the road compared to the lockdown of March and April last year and his party was receiving numerous calls that people were being told they had to go into work.

“I want to see the Health and Safety Authority doing a survey of all businesses of 20 employees or more to find out why so many people are working in their offices. Why is there so much traffic on the roads?” he said.

“For me, it is completely different from last year. The volume of traffic and people, I hear that people are being told they have to go into work. Why is this not being looked at?”

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“That is a key part of what we are looking at today.”

Speaking at Leinster House, Mr Kelly asserted it was now clear the Government’s Living with Covid strategy had failed.

“It’s very clear to us the Government does not have a strategy.

There are no details on what (measures) are continuing, what will change, how we are going to manage mutations and variants, and how we can suppress the virus.”

He said Labour believed all incoming passengers who were non-essential should be quarantined in hotels once they enter the country.

His colleague, Ged Nash, welcomed the new checkpoints at the Border but said there should be more.

“2021 cannot be the same as 2020. We have to do whatever we can to give people hope. I have never in my time in politis seen so many people who are feeling down and depressed as they are at this moment in time.

“By having an aggressive suppression strategy we can hopefully ensure that we could have a better 2021,” he said.

Asked what he meant by the strategy, Mr Kelly said its aim was to get the case numbers down to the low double digits. “Then have public health teams that are resourced and can act Panzer-like in dealing with the virus,” (when it occurs in a locality).

He added that vaccine rollout would not be the panacea in 2021 that everybody thought it would be. He also described the absence of data-sharing between North and South as an “absolute shambles”.

“Optimally an all island strategy using the sea as our protection would have been the best strategy. Politics has failed. It is not going to happen,” he said.

At a separate event outside Leinster House Richard Boyd-Barrett of People Before Profit called for fuel allowance to be extended to all recipients of the Pandemic Unemployment Payment. He also argued for the allowance to be increased particularly with temperatures plunging as they are now.

“It should be increased because people who are out of work have to spend much longer periods at home with heating and all that costs incurred with that.That is a very significant hardship,” he said.

Also speaking outside Leinster House a little later, Social Democrats social housing spokesperson Cian O’Callaghan said that changes needed to be made to the Land Development Agency (LDA). He said it did not have strong enough compulsory purchase powers to build up banks of land. He also said councillors were unable to insist to the LDA that the land be used for affordable or social housing.

His colleague Jennifer Whitmore said the party was drafting a Bill to extend the Mother and Baby Commission’s term by a further year. She said the Commission was due to dissolve on February 28th but it was important that it remained in place to deal with questions over the destruction of files.

Ms Whitmore, a TD for Wicklow, also called for a full Oireachtas debate on CETA, the trade deal between the European Union and Canada. She said the issue of the investor court system needed particular scrutiny and said the deal had never been fully debated in the Dáil.

“The Government tried to sneak it through the Dáil before Christmas,” she said. Ms Whitmore pointed to the fact that most media attention around CETA was on the internal row that was continuing within the Green party. She said the issue needed to be broadened beyond narrow internal politics.