Company and planning laws need to be changed to protect workers

Company law was not designed to enable people to walk away from their obligations to

It was Edward Heath, the British Prime Minister, who coined the phrase “the unacceptable face of capitalism” about a particularly odious set of manoeuvres in the 1970s.

More than 40 years later, we have just seen the ugliest and most brutal face of capitalism in Ireland. The commercial transaction that destroyed Clerys department store was calculated to do exactly that. What makes it worse, in many ways, is that our laws allowed it to happen.