Job Losses
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-24
============================================================

Sinéad Gibney (SD), Dublin Rathdown

I have been working with this particular group of Covalen staff since January when the initial threats of redundancies were mooted. Since then, we have seen much larger redundancy numbers hitting this group. It has been an inspiring experience to work with them. They are a newly mobilised part of the workers' sector where tech and data workers are realising how precarious their jobs are right now in the context of artificial intelligence.
Rather than going over what has already been discussed in the Chamber, I will pick up from an exchange last week when in response to questions from Deputy Pa Daly, the Minister of State said that Ireland has a strong robust legal framework in place to protect workers experiencing redundancy. I really want to question and interrogate that today. Although these workers have been mobilised, because we have a voluntary system they have found this new understanding of workers’ rights but then they have been faced with the fact that the company does not have to meet them there. One of the workers who emailed me stated, "Currently a majority of impacted staff do not meet the criteria for the statutory redundancy entitlements - it is crucial that the department intervene to demonstrate that AI related job cuts of this magnitude are not allowed to have such disproportionately negative consequences for workers"

---

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/2026-06-24/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:06+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-24