Ms Liz Murray:

The section 481 relief is paid to a producer company, not to a DAC. A document concerning section 481 was produced by the Department of Finance in the context of budget 2023.

This document says this is paid to the producer company and the special purpose vehicle is for accounting purposes. It is an accounting tool to keep the money for each film within the confines of that single film so it cannot be spread about to other films. In the context of section 481, therefore, the DAC is muddying the waters in that the employers are telling us or trying to imply the DAC is perhaps the employer. However, in the undertaking the Department of Finance made in 2019, the Department specifically mentioned certain legislation. The Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act and adherence to that is mentioned specifically. A person must be employed on two contracts over a four-year period to qualify for that. The producer company then has to be the one with the responsibility to ensure adherence to that particular legislation, and from that flows all other legislation, but because that has a qualifying criteria of two contracts over four years, it is the one that is easiest to relate to. It is simple to do that.

On the Deputy's question about the Department of Finance, the lads are calling me Andy Dufresne from "The Shawshank Redemption" because I write so often. I have written to the Department of Finance and the Minister in particular, I have written to the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media and the Minister there, as well as her predecessor. We have been writing to the Department of Finance since 2010. We asked for forensic accountants to come in and examine the relationships and everything else because we cannot get to the bottom of it. This document that was produced is so confusing. There is something here that the Department says there are 8,630 weeks in relation to a production in 2019. It is a long time since I was in school but as far as I know there are 52 weeks in every year and it does not matter how you spin that, you cannot come to 8,600 or whatever weeks in a one-year period. We have written to the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. Our case-----