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

I will say one thing on these figures that have been alluded to. We are talking about 3,265 whole time equivalents and that includes extras and that over a two-year period that is 34,000. As we know, extras are not people who are really employees of the industry. They are people who may come in and out so they can be discounted as being part of a permanent creative pool that is supposed to be supported by State aid. I do not know what that figure comes down to if they are taken out, but it comes down considerably. We are down to quite a low figure of people, probably around 2,500, which interestingly enough is not much different from what it was in 2018 when we first started to look into all of this. Let us remember that at the time the representatives of the industry, including representatives of Departments, said there were 17,000 people. We then got to the truth and it was a lot less. First, I ask people to bear that in mind. It is a very low number of people. One of the groups that claims to "represent" the people in the industry, which is a private company that gets money from Screen Ireland, claims it "represents" 2,500 people in the industry. That means it represents everybody in the industry. Who does SIPTU represent? Who does Irish Film and Television Academy, IFTA, represent? Who do the craft unions represent? The numbers do not add up. Everybody is claiming to be representative.

I would ask serious questions about all of this. Ms Donaghy said that she would prefer to have a job where she knows she has her desk and some sort of security. Why on earth would one imagine that of anybody, unless they are doing very well? There are a few people in this world who can say that they worked for eight weeks and made so much money that they can take a couple of months off and know that they will then get another job. There are a few people like that but very few and that is not viable for the vast majority of ordinary people. Let us not pretend that is the case for artists and performers, because it is a unique characteristic of the industry that that is a viable reality for the vast majority of them. We had testimony from artists' representative groups that most of them live in poverty. It is ridiculous for people to come in here as they have and say that is a viable employment situation when they have no clue. Even though they may have worked in the industry for 20, 25 or 30 years, they have no clue and no right to expect that they will get another employment from one employment to another. None. We have had clear testimony to that effect from the producer companies who get the money. They have told us that they cannot be the employers and that they have no employment relationship with people. Unless the witnesses know different, they told us that there is not a single worker on film production who has a contract of indefinite duration, not one. We had a fairly high-profile case about RTÉ about the same issue that was brought in here by film crew working on "Fair City" in the news recently. That will be adjudicated and so on but this is a serious issue because it is coming up and up again.

I am referring to people who have worked on an RTÉ production on a series of successive fixed-term contracts but who were told they had no right to a contract of indefinite duration. We have had testimony at this committee from the producers acknowledging what the crew told us, which is that not a single worker has benefitted from the provisions of the fixed-term workers Act even though those same producer companies have to sign a declaration saying that they have to comply with this Act. If one parses what they have said it is clear that what they are saying is that under no circumstances could the fixed-term workers Act ever apply and yet they signed a declaration saying it would. I just do not see-----