Mr. Ger Gibbons:

I will pick up on the point about bogus self-employment. We just completed a submission last week to the Revenue Commissioners, who are doing a review of their statement of strategy for 2023 to 2026. One of the issues that we raised in the submission we sent to them was that they have repeatedly acknowledged over the years that bogus self-employment is a problem in the construction sector, but if we look at their annual reports, the number of what they call interventions or checks in the sector has been declining in recent years. They are not the only ones involved: it is also with the Department of Social Protection and the Workplace Relations Commission. Off the top of my head, I think the number of checks that they conducted in 2018 was about 16,000, in 2019 it was about 13,000, but in 2020 and 2021 - admittedly during the pandemic - it fell to about 7,000. We acknowledge that it was during the pandemic, but there seems to be a declining pattern in recent years. They are not the only people involved, as other State agencies are involved as well, but when they do checks, they raise revenue. The amount of revenue that they have returned from people who were misclassified as bogusly self-employed has been declining in recent years. It is something that we raised in our submission to Revenue last week, and it is something we will be raising as well with the Department of Social Protection and the Workplace Relations Commission.