Labour Court Dail Éireann — 2026-05-06 ============================================================ Pat Buckley (SF), Cork East I thank the Minister of State for being here. A Labour Court recommendation on 22 October 2022 recommended that Stryker management in Carrigtohill should enter into negotiations with SIPTU, with a view to concluding a collective agreement that covers procedural arrangements within which normal industrial relations business can be conducted. It would have given members a voice at the negotiating table so that serious issues, such as improving health and safety standards, at both plants in Cork would be addressed. I raise this because it goes back to 2018. The said factory was subject to a Cork City Council health and safety motion. That was ignored. Around 2021, I was involved with Deputy Mairéad Farrell and former Minister, Michael McGrath, on the Protected Disclosures (Amendment) Act 2022 because I had possession of a protected disclosure on the failings of all the health and safety in this. I went to three separate taoisigh over a number of years on this. I have met with the HSE on this. There is a High Court case running at the moment. I will be careful not to mention any more about that, but it has been delayed continuously. Multinationals are coming into this country and they can rickshaw over Government policy. They will not recognise unions. Unfortunately, between working on protected disclosures - in protected disclosure law the most important one is the reversal of burden of proof for whistleblowers today who have more powers - and in my experience of dealing with this specific protected disclosure, every one of those whistleblowers were got at, so they have disappeared. I do not know about that court case I mentioned. When you are given a protected disclosure specifically on health and safety issues, you are duty-bound to report it. I do not know whether the DPP has got that evidence. That is serious. I do not know how to find out, which is very serious. If we move onto 2023, after numerous articles in most of the national papers reporting the failures in health and safety on this, we had a fatality. It is three years on and that family are still in limbo because that company is ignoring them. The company has refused to engage with any union. As recently as last week, I got another anonymous letter mentioning the said company and another pharmaceutical company in Cork, which I will not mention. I am here like anybody else as an elected representative and people put trust in us. These were red flags going back to 2018. We are now in 2026. If we go from 2018 to 2023, it had at least four to five major incidents where people were hospitalised. Health and safety were ignored. We are talking about titanium fires. I contacted Cork County Fire Service. It cannot put out a titanium fire. This individual died by burning. Titanium burns at around 2,000°F. To this day, I am stuck in limbo here. That is why I wanted to raise this tonight. The Labour Court recommendation is just to engage with unions that were concerned about health and safety. This is the decision in October 2022. We are now in May 2026. Nothing has moved forward. We have had a fatality. We have also had some major incidents that have been reported where people were left out in the car park - three in particular - with no health and safety officer. Nobody knew whether it was water, oil, gas or air before they were hospitalised. There is a breakdown in communications. I am just trying to understand why these companies will not engage in respect of the Labour Court recommendations. In this country, we have unions, and people have a right to be represented. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-05-06/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:54+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-06