Ms Colette Godkin:

It is interesting to hear what Mr. Kelly had to say. This comes back to Deputy Bríd Smith's question on what we could do, as a trade union. One of the issues in the English language training sector is lack of union recognition and victimisation of union members. We need to gain union recognition in ELT schools and put an end to the victimisation of members for a couple of reasons. We need to support our members if they should decide to take a case and pursue the question of whether they are bogus self-employed. In addition, we have to educate our members because we have found a lack of awareness, particularly among younger teachers, as to how harmful bogus self-employment is to them. They are not necessarily aware that they are losing out on social welfare, that their status will affect their pension in the future and that they are basically being excluded from unfair dismissals legislation and legislation that protects their parental rights. As a union, we want to be able to educate our members about this and support them if they want to take cases and pursue the issue. Union recognition is very important to us to be able to do that.

There is also a legislative avenue for us, specifically in English language teaching. To be able to accept visa students, which is a significant part of the ELT business, schools need to be on a Department of Justice and Equality list known as the interim list of education providers. There is a mechanism for the State to determine whether schools are engaging in bogus self-employment. If a school is engaging in that or other abuses of Irish employment law, it should be removed from that list and lose its accreditation, which would mean it could no longer take in visa students. That would act as an incentive to schools to stop engaging in this practice and treat their workers properly.