Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I will ask two questions, one of which will be on the central issue of continuity of employment for the people who are affected by precarious work. As Ms O'Loughlin indicated, there may be people at a very high and specific skill level who can pick and choose. Let us call it what it is. In the same way, a few A-list stars can pick and choose their movies. However, that is not the situation for the majority of people, and it is them whom we must discuss. I accept that there may be genuine breaks and so on, but I can see nothing from what has been described of the status quothat would prevent companies from deciding not to re-employ certain people because they did not like them. Some of the witnesses may say that is not going on, it rarely goes on or whatever, but we have workers who are saying that it is going on. It is not necessarily up to us to judge who is telling the truth, but there has to be a structure that prevents it from happening, links public funding to guarantees that it will not happen and ensures that there is enforcement and monitoring. If money is going into the film industry through tax reliefs or whatever and certificates are being given to people about quality employment and so on, there has to be monitoring and enforcement. We have to know that quality employment is being provided and that there is fairness in the treatment of the workers.

Obviously, there is a pool of workers in the industry. Step 1 is that, after two, three or four years, a person is qualified, is in the pool and cannot be discriminated against within that pool on the arbitrary basis of someone liking or disliking him or her. That last aspect is what we must prevent in order to achieve fairness. People might respond to this comment, but we must reach that point. It is only fair to those who work in the industry.

If there is this level of money going into the industry, and I would like to see more, there should be more permanent employment than is the case. I get the point about not wanting to employ someone for six months doing nothing but, on the other hand, the level of permanent employment – we cannot even get a figure on it – seems to be low compared with the amount of Government money. That needs to be addressed.

There is something called the working time directive, which, if I remember correctly, allows someone to work 39 hours plus a certain amount of overtime under EU law. Is this being flagrantly disregarded in the film industry when it comes to many of the industry's workers?