Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As I have acknowledged previously, the Minister, more than any other Minister - there are a few Ministers who potentially should have been involved in this - and his officials have responded and there have been changes and improvements.

The awful irony in all of this is that the people who brought the issue to the attention of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht in 2018 and gave evidence to the committee have not worked in the industry again. They are people who had worked in the industry for decades. There is no doubt that they have been blacklisted out of the industry and subjected to horrendous vilification. I am sure the people who vilified them will say they are awful people but normally when someone is vilified in an employment relationship, there is a process in place. If an employer has a problem with an employee, or vice versa, there is a process involving disciplinary action, cautions, hearings and so on. The problem is that these workers have never had the opportunity to have their case heard in a fair way because there is nothing currently to prevent a film producer from simply telling a worker they are not being employed again because they do not like that worker, what he or she said or the criticism he or she made. The reason there is nothing to stop that is because of the acceptance of this narrative of employees working project to project and the relationship of the DAC to the producer company.

I am nonplussed, as I said. I know the Minister stated the requirement for equality, employment and training applies to both the DAC and the producer company. The problem is the relationship between the producer company, which is the recipient, and the DAC, because the DAC is short-lived. For example, if an employee works for the DAC, while that DAC is in existence, it is required to comply. However, if it does not comply and the employee later takes a case, the producer company, the only entity that still exists - it is above the project to project work and is the continuous factor in all of this - will argue that the DAC is gone. The producer company will assert that it does not have an obligation and cannot be held responsible because the DAC, which had an obligation, no longer exists. However, the person who set up the DAC still exists and that person is the producer company, which is in receipt of the relief.

The Minister has stated that it is up to the WRC to give a direction on this matter, but I do not think that is the case. I am asking the Minister and his officials to look at the detail. An instruction should come from the Government, clearly stating that where a film producer tells a worker that they do not have an employment relationship with that worker because the DAC had the relationship with the worker, it is not an acceptable case to make and film producers should not be allowed to make such a case because, in fact, the DAC and film producer are one and the same. If that instruction went to the WRC or the legislation was tweaked as required to say that that is not an acceptable position to adopt or case to make when employees worked on productions funded under section 481 or, for that matter, by Screen Ireland, it would make a big difference. It would clarify the position.

Such a direction should apply to the pool of people who have worked in the industry for the past ten years, 15 years or 20 years. I know of a man, who had worked on the first season of "Vikings" and stood outside Ardmore Studios or Ashford Studios - I am not sure which - a few weeks ago. He has since died. He fully expected to work on the next season of the show but he was considered to be associated with the wrong people, was not re-employed and he is now longer alive. Shortly before he ended his life, he stood outside a place where he had worked for years, wondering why he was not taken back in. It is brutal stuff, and there is nothing to stop it happening. For many of the people involved, it is far too late by the time they get through the WRC process, the Labour Court and all the rest of it. The Minister knows what a rigmarole that is. The film producer companies have resources, whereas the individuals who have worked in the industry for years and are trying to make their own case do not. It is just not right.

The Minister argued that because there are sectors in which there are a number of different operators and people move between these operators, if someone moves from employer A to employer B and then back to employer A, that is just what happens and that is life. However, I put it to him that there are two big differences in this case. The first is that none of these film productions - and I mean none - would exist without public money. The State has a big responsibility here. The film industry is not like the music industry in this country, for example, because the music industry never got State money until Covid. The film industry is utterly reliant on public money. No films would be made without it and, therefore, the State has a particular responsibility in that regard. Second, if it was just a case of lots of different actors in a particular sector moving from employer A to employer B or from employer B to employer C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J and so on, perhaps that case could be made. However, as I said, we know there is actually a relatively small group who are the beneficiaries. Workers will perhaps move from employer A to employer B, and then to employer C, but they are only moving between those three employers.

The film industry is a publicly-funded sector in which the various players would not exist without public money and where, generally speaking, the workers are bouncing between the big three or four players.

That is not being addressed. Ultimately, unless it is addressed, it will operate to the detriment of the quality of film and to the sector as a whole.

Deputy Doherty referred to the North. I agree absolutely about what he said about the living wage although when one is working on a film, one is quite well paid and generally receives more than the living wage. The problem is what happens afterwards, especially if the industry decides it does not like you. It certainly seems to me that in other jurisdictions there is far greater rights for the pool of people to be seen as part of that pool and not to be arbitrarily excluded from the pool because somebody does not like them. That is what I am looking for.

To use an analogy, in the worst-case scenarios of the Strumpet Citydays, dockers would turn up and there were opportunities to load ships for different companies. The scenario was that a company would either take a worker or not, on a completely arbitrary basis. One of the ways that was addressed was through the establishment of a stevedore company where dockers became part of a pool. They might be loading different companies' ships but there was a sort of registered pool of people and, therefore, a bit of fairness in the allocation of work, even though different companies were operating within that pool of dockers. Something like that could and should be done so that we know who is in the pool of employees and who is in the pool of trainees. Even commitments on training mean very little if we cannot track the journey of the trainee. Is the person who was trained on film A still around for film D that is being made by the same producer or group of producers? Has that trainee qualified? Is he or she now accepted as part of a pool of people with skills in the film sector?Is he or she, at any point, excluded from that pool? That issue is not being addressed.

I appeal to the Minister and his officials to look at this again to try to tighten it up. If there is uncertainty as to precisely how the working time directive and the relationship between DACs and production companies are playing out and being represented by different groups in the Labour Court, I believe it would be entirely right and legitimate for the Minister to intervene and state what the Government wants and how it wants these things interpreted. If that requires now statutory instruments or legislative change, so be it. I am not even sure it does require those things. The situation needs to be clarified and the Government needs to crack the whip, as it were.