Mr. Martin McMahon:

I do but I see a very serious issue with it. The Department of Social Protection and Revenue are specifically precluded from making group and class decisions by case law. In the Denny case, a seminal case on bogus self-employment, Mr. Justice Keane was very clear that each case must be taken on its own particular facts; just because one is a courier one cannot say that all couriers are self-employed no more than one can say that of a journalist or doctors. The Department has admitted that it is doing test cases and using the precedents to label entire industries as self-employed. Where ICTU is saying that they should be employees by default and the employer should have to prove if they are self-employed, the way it works now is that the Revenue Commissioners and the Department of Social Protection are classifying workers as default self-employed. If the worker wants to appeal that decision he or she must go through a process, and that process relies on a worker not being able to overturn the decision.