Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Professor Doherty and thank him very much for his very interesting presentation.

Significant consequences flow from the category an individual falls into, be he or she an employee or self-employed. Professor Doherty mentioned the usual cases. I thank him for drawing attention to the anti-competitive scenario, where, if somebody is classed as self-employed, he or she is not entitled to bargain collectively.

On the point raised by the Chairman, my approach was to bring forward legislation to penalise arrangements under which people were more or less coerced into stating they were self-employed when clearly they were employees. The approach I took was to set out the various criteria that would point towards a person being an employee and the various criteria that would point toward a person being self-employed and let the WRC or the court, on appeal, to decide the facts in each individual case. With reference to what Professor Doherty said about the definitions and the difficulty in interpreting the definitions of "employee", the approach I have outlined is as good as any. No matter what the definition is, or how comprehensive it is, it will still result in a case by case approach. As the professor said, it can vary from one type of business to another.

I would like to hear Professor Doherty's views on the UK approach of creating a third category of "worker". He said there was an advantage in that it extended certain limited protections to employees in precarious employment. There is also a disadvantage in the sense that, under Irish law, where there is no third category, an employee might be classified in respect of all of the protections provided, whereas if there were another category of "worker", it might mean that some of the protections afforded to an individual so classified would be removed.