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.

Sentiment score: 0.02

I agree with the Taoiseach that it is not either-or. SMEs are certainly the backbone of our economy but what we have seen is an over-dependence on a handful of small tech companies and that is the concern. Yes, of course, there are many SMEs that are working with them and are in the supply chain but the problem, as the Taoiseach said, is the lack of scaling up of SMEs and the lack of investment in indigenous start-ups. That is a real concern. We need to diversify the economy. It is not just the Labour Party saying this; we have heard it from every expert who has looked at our economy. There is a particular concern about workers' rights in tech companies. Let us look at the issue of performance improvement programmes, PIPs. These spurious programmes are being used by tech companies to justify redundancies. They are squeezing those PIPs until they squeak. This is what we are seeing. They are using legal loopholes to justify making redundancies. There is an issue about workers' rights in tech companies. At a minimum, what we have called for in the Labour Party, is the introduction of stronger workers' rights protections to force big tech to play fair amid these plans to lay off workers and to expose this issue of AI washing.

Sentiment score: 0.11

Tech companies are making huge profits while saying that they need to cut costs.

Sentiment score: 0.48