Ms Karan O'Loughlin:

The arts community in Ireland is relatively small, so it is easy for that to happen. One of the factors that has fed the cult of the individual has been the growth of freelance or self-employed workers in the sector in the past 25 years or so. I will repeat what I have already said: one of the ways to deal with that is to look at the level of protection afforded to self-employed or freelance individuals, that is, examine the definition of "worker" in the employment legislation. As I said previously, most of the employment legislation refers to "employees". As a result, if one is in a situation where there is a bad culture or there is the cult of the personality and on is a freelance or self-employed person, one does not have any rights at work in the way that an employee of the organisation involved would have. In my view, the way to deal with this issue would be to change the requirement so that people would be workers as opposed to employees and then everybody would have equal protection. It would certainly help to address the vulnerability of freelance workers and break that down.