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

These three amendments are all focused on the same issue. It is a matter I have raised many times, as the Minister knows. Since the previous Finance Bill, when we debated some of the issues extensively in this committee, the Committee on Budgetary Oversight has produced a report on the section 481 tax relief. That report includes a whole series of recommendations.

What the Minister has done in this Bill is take on board one of those recommendations, the one that benefits the film producers and that was requested by the film producers to raise the expenditure cap on the credit from €70 million to €125 million. The rationale they have put forward is that this will open up the possibility of bigger film productions and attract investment for bigger film productions. I do not really have a problem with that. I have to be honest and say I would rather we did it a slightly different way. A lot of the beneficiaries of this are big, very profitable film companies like Netflix, Disney and so on, rather the development of our own film industry. Having said that, I am for more money going into developing film production in this country. As I hope the Minister knows, the committee asked for many other things. It was quite clear in saying that the support should be conditional. A relatively small number of film production companies get the majority of the credit. Many companies receive it but, a little bit like our last credit, there are five or six companies that get most of it and do so again and again.

I will give the Minister an example that highlights some of the points we are concerned about. I went to the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, recently in respect of one of the companies that came in to our committee lobbying for the increase of this cap. The company did not turn up at the WRC in a case taken by a worker who worked on one of the film productions funded under section 481. The company said it was not the proper respondent and that the designated activity company, DAC, was the respondent. According to the legislation, the DAC set up to make the film has to be a wholly owned subsidiary of the film production company. However, when an employee of the DAC takes the company that gets the relief to the WRC over unfair dismissal, the company says, "We know we set it up but we are not the right respondent because it is the DAC. We are not turning up, giving evidence or taking responsibility for the employee." The worker has no recourse. This is Russian dolls. It is absolutely unacceptable. It is happening repeatedly. I do not know how many times the Minister has been told about it but the Government does nothing about it. These companies sign undertakings which the Government has been forced to bring in as a result of the campaigning of workers in the industry. They say they will abide by this and that bit of legislation but they sign it with a big grin because they know it does not matter as it does not apply to them. At least, they argue it does not apply and there is no enforcement. Nobody bothers to check what is actually going on, even though the Government has been told again and again. There is simply no recourse for people who are victimised or blacklisted, who kick up over their employment rights. I will not identify the company or anything, but the particular person I went to the WRC with-----