Job Losses
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-24
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

Covalen is a window into the future for hundreds of thousands of workers in this country and across the world about AI replacing their jobs and then being made redundant by companies that have made enormous profits off the back of those workers and then leave those workers high and dry. In the case of Covalen workers, nearly 1,000 workers have lost their jobs over the last year, 720 recently, almost halving the workforce. They trained the AI to replace them and then they got left high and dry. As Meta has said they cannot work for another six months for any other company, what are they supposed to do to pay the rent?
Covalen, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cpl, an Irish company which has contracts with the Government, is refusing to even talk to the workers’ trade union. These are people who protect us from the toxic disgusting content of social media as content moderators. They do an important job in our society and are being treated like dirt. Many of them will walk away with nothing or minimum statutory redundancy while Covalen has made enormous profits for Cpl and for Meta. The Government should not allow this and should use the leverage of Cpl contracts with the Government to say it will not get any more Government contracts if it treats workers like dirt like this. It is in the interest of every worker to support Cpl workers because this is the future for other workers if Covalen gets away with this.

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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