Mr. Martin McMahon:

The Deputy raises an important point. The Department of Social Protection, Revenue and the social welfare appeals office are making group and class decisions. They determine employment status by group and-or by class. No legislation exists to allow that. Therefore, no legislation exists to allow a group of workers to overturn that case or to appeal that case by group or by class. There is simply no legislation to allow workers to do that. This affects thousands of employees. If one looks at all couriers going back to the origin of couriers as a type of work, going back to the early 1980s, from that time up to the present, all of those thousands of people have been classified as self-employed. If one looks at construction, where the employer gets to designate employment status and the Department sought to have test cases in 2015, hundreds of thousands of workers are involved, past, present and future.