Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2026-05-26 ============================================================ Ivana Bacik (LAB), Dublin Bay South Before I begin, I want to congratulate new the Deputies, Daniel Ennis and Sean Kyne. As a by-election veteran myself, I wish them the very best, although I was elected during Covid so I missed out on the handshakes, hugs and lovely warmth they got. Recent lay-offs in the tech sector are causing huge stress and anxiety for those receiving redundancy notices, those seeing their colleagues being laid off and the communities affected. My constituency, Dublin Bay South, is home to many tech companies and to the workers who keep them running. Entire communities have been built on the promise of secure, well-paid tech jobs, but this news reminds us of the vulnerability of that model and of our national economy. Meta is cutting 350 jobs here. That proportion of the workforce vastly exceeds global averages. The IT sector here has shed more than 20,000 jobs in the past year alone. How are the tech oligarchs dressing this up? They refer to it as modernisation and flattening teams. That is awful language when they are talking about people's livelihoods and lives. Flattening companies really means throwing staff to the wolves to satisfy shareholders and inflate share prices. Multibillion euro corporations led by Trumpian cheerleaders in Silicon Valley are using AI as cover for years of over-hiring and ruthless cost-cutting. This is AI washing and these companies are showing contempt for the industrial relations mechanisms of the State. We are seeing this with Covalen, which snubbed an invitation to the Workplace Relations Commission even as it looks to sack 700 people. They can do so with impunity it seems because our labour laws are too weak. These corporations know something else too. They know how vulnerable Ireland is. Our economy is dangerously dependent on a handful of tech giants, and they know that the Government is frightened of them and is afraid they will pull investment and move jobs elsewhere, so we are in permanent game of chicken, and the biggest losers are the people now fearing for their futures. As our enterprise spokesperson, Deputy George Lawlor, has said, we have a pool of highly skilled talent who are now being made redundant and so somebody must call the bluff of the tech giants. What we need, and what Labour has been calling for, is a serious industrial strategy to ensure that Ireland is more than just a host for multinational profits. We need to start cultivating indigenous Irish enterprise and innovation to develop a domestic start-up boom in the AI and tech sectors. We also need stronger collective bargaining rights, stronger protections for workers facing redundancy and serious investment in education, retraining and upskilling. Above all, we need a government that will stand up to the tech billionaires. What we in the Labour Party are asking is: what is the Government's strategy in the face of these job losses to protect tech jobs and to ensure that we diversify our economy and reduce our over-reliance on multinationals? --- 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/2026-05-26/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:04+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-26