Mr. John McKeon:

-----in the past three or four years. There has been none in the past year.

What I would say is when we look at bogus self-employment and trends in self-employment - I provided the information in my opening statement and in the supplementary information - it is not that it does not exist but it does not exist to the extent that is commonly perceived. I refer to all of the data. The ESRI has studied this and has separately produced a report. The report on zero-hours contracts was similar. When one goes looking for evidence of precarious employment, the levels of bogus self-employment in Ireland that one can detect are much lower than in other European countries. That does not mean that there is not a problem and that every case is not an issue to be dealt with, but just to make the general point, it is not as prevalent as people think.

For example, we conducted 2,000 employer inspections as our response to the media campaign that we ran, both in Dublin and in Galway. In Galway, they concentrated on the construction industry. We interviewed more than 170 staff and there was only one case that was suspicious. When we finalised the investigation of that case, it was found to be correctly classified as self-employed. In Dublin, when we did more than 1,000 inspections, there were three cases that we found to be suspicious, all of them, by the way, in the private security sector which is not something we were expecting to find. Those three cases are being followed up. If they lead to prosecutions in due course, we will follow them up. I have no interest in presenting something that is not the case. It is just that what we learned from our own data and our own experience is not what is sometimes presented to us.