Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 25 May 2021

Public Accounts Committee

Business of Committee

9:30 am

Photo of Catherine MurphyCatherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

We will not know if it is a full and final settlement to start with. The Revenue audit has the ability to look back and we know that is under way. The key issue is that 78 people were essentially offered contracts where there was concern that these were inappropriate temporary contracts. In RTÉ, there are people on genuine contracts on a temporary basis, but these were people who should have been directly employed.

The Eversheds report permitted this form of employment to go back a couple of years. If it goes back a couple of years, but employees have essentially been in casual employment for six, seven, eight or ten years or whatever, that is the status they should have had for that time. It follows from that that there are entitlements from being employed as opposed to being self-employed in the context of, for example, pension or welfare entitlements or whatever. Essentially, it is to get to the net point, in acknowledging whether these 78 people were in permanent employment, that it is retrospective. It the reason we asked about the issues around Revenue because there are Revenue implications if there is a timeline beyond the current year. That might not have been picked up in previous accounts.

We are probably going to be stuck with finding this out in next year's accounts, or those of subsequent years, because it may well not be a full and final settlement. It probably is not if there is a Revenue audit, which could pick up other issues up that may not give us a clean look at what is happening here. The key issue is whether that retrospection is going to happen. We have no indication from RTÉ that this will be the case. If they are now accepted as employees of the company, and they have been doing exactly the same job for a number of years, they have an entitlement to that status for the years they were employed.

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