Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

My apologies, I am unable to raise the hand signal for some reason. I am not sure how comfortable I am about moving in on the big screen, but we are where we are.

I welcome this amendment. I commend Deputy Nash on bringing forward this amendment on bogus self-employment, which we know is occurring in many areas. As highlighted by Deputy Nash, it is happening in the aviation sector, the construction sector, the food delivery sector in terms of the Deliveroo service, the taxi sector and so on. It was reported to the Committee of Public Accounts recently that up to €1 billion is being lost annually owing to bogus self-employment. Research by ICTU indicated that the loss could be approximately €600 million. This is a huge amount of money in the context of the discussions we have had on earlier amendments. That this amount of money is being lost to the Exchequer is a massive issue. It is high time we got serious about tackling it.

On a related point, we hear often about the pensions timebomb and people being asked or forced to work for longer or until they are older. If we are losing out on up to €1 billion or, as stated by ICTU, €600 million, we need to tackle this matter. In my view, addressing bogus self-employment is crucial for fairness for people. In discussing the pensions timebomb we should be focused on the bogus self-employment issue in terms of bringing in additional finances to deal with demographic changes and so on.