Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. McMahon and thank him for his diligent pursuit of this issue. Regardless of what the Department of Social Protection and Revenue might outline about the cases, which is not to disparage their specific responses, the issue of bogus self-employment is real. Anybody who has been out in the real world knows that there are people who are classified as self-employed who, under any basic rationale, clearly are not. They are working for one employer on a full-time basis for a prolonged period.

I refer to one case that I am aware of. I have a report here from a person who won a case. This person was working for a meat processing plant in Cork. The report states that the person is a line worker for a specific employer so he regards himself as an employee of an agency. He works for eight to ten hours a day. He was subject to control and direction. He is not free to take up similar work at the same time. It goes further to highlight how this individual was clearly an employee. However, his employment situation was that he technically worked for a company registered in his name in Poland, despite that he had never been to Poland. It took six months for this person to get his Scope decision and a further six months to have his decision regularised. Even then, his PRSI payments were apparently not backdated. The Department of Social Protection referred to its method, which it is confident in, of catching bogus self-employment through inspections. In the case I have outlined, there were not any follow-up inspections of that person's colleagues, who one would have to imagine are in the exact same position.

Representatives of Meat Industry Ireland attended the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response. They spoke of the use of agency workers and they indicated that the use of agency workers in that sector was actually declining at the moment. Does Mr. McMahon get a sense that the number of workers who are entrapped into this type of employment situation across all sectors is declining or increasing?

How many people are involved? Is the emergence of new types of companies, such as Deliveroo, and workers associated with such companies contributing to an increase in such employment or is it a type of employment practice that is in decline, as stated by Meat Industry Ireland?