Ms Patricia King:

I will respond to that. Legislation arising from a European directive in 2012 was introduced to deal with temporary agency workers. It provides that agency workers should not be treated any less favourably than their counterparts who are directly employed. However, this is being bypassed by some employers by constructing this self-employed company they are putting in place. They are constructing a way around this. In aviation it is done in a very sophisticated way. In this case I gather it is not that sophisticated. The home employer is in Poland and not in Ireland at all. When those workers are fictitiously or bogusly self-employed, they end up with no entitlements to anything and those workers lose out.

What have we done about it? Neither the Deputy nor I have all day to outline how much we have done. I have hawked myself around every Department and Minister to try to get the issue of bogus self-employment dealt with. The Revenue Commissioners rules allow somebody to be declared self-employed by the employer; that is acceptable. Unless we get to a place where workers are not regarded as self-employed until they put forward the evidence as being non-bogusly self-employed, we will not deal with this. We have hawked ourselves around the place to anybody who would listen to this to take on this argument. I had a conversation with the chairman of the Revenue Commissioners. I have spoken to the Minister for Finance. Every pre-budget submission we make includes dealing with bogus self-employment. We have made very little headway.

To be fair, Deputy O'Dea-----