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

Unfortunately, it does not. The problem is that there cannot be a collective agreement, under law, if there is not an employer and an employee. It cannot happen. It has no legal basis. Any collective agreement without an employer and employee is meaningless. That solution is not possible.

I will not mention a particular company that is involved. Even the workers who are in dispute with these companies want the film industry to work. Many of them are being blackballed, some because they raised these issues when they appeared before the Joint Committee on Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht in 2018 and have not worked in the film industry since. Those people have had to take cases to the Labour Court and Workplace Relations Commission and, in some cases, have had their good names taken and so on because they have raised questions about who their employer is.

A discussion between a representative body of screen producers and one trade union is not a collective agreement because it is not between an employer and an employee. That is the only sort of collective agreement that has any standing. There must be an employer and an employee. The people who are getting the relief, the employers, are saying that they do not have any employees. How can a collective agreement exist, in that case?

The Labour Court recently found on behalf of a worker in one case in terms of a breach of a collective agreement that had been agreed previously between workers and employers, but again the producer company, all of the time in receipt of section 481 relief, went into the Labour Court and stated it had no relationship with the worker. Even though that person worked on the film production, the producer company claimed to have no relationship with them and not to be their employer. It is absolutely unbelievable.

The Minister mentioned Screen Producers Ireland. I understand that representatives of Screen Producers Ireland will give evidence in some cases to say that continuity of service cannot exist in the film industry and that the industry is just not like that. They gave that evidence when they appeared before the Oireachtas committee. They essentially argue that film is different and the sector cannot have practices such as acknowledgement of service. This all sounds technical but I will repeat that the net effect is that people who have worked in the industry for 20 and 30 years have no rights. They are like the dockers in Strumpet Citywho used to appear down at the docks, ask for a job and be told by the guy at the gate that he does not fancy employing them today.

That is the level of rights people have in the film industry. It is totally unacceptable. We cannot have a meaningful agreement of any description until it is clear who is the employer and who is the employee. That should be the condition of receiving section 481 relief because that is what the law says it should be. This is the employer with no ambiguity and these are the employees. Then we can discuss collective agreements and all the rest of it.