Mr. John McKeon:

We started off, based on feedback from this committee, and we would also have met with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, and so on. We started off looking at the meat industry and construction but the pickings are very slim, if I can put it that way, in those sectors. We have had a look at 6,000 construction workers and, I believe, 25,000 workers in the meat sector. Out of both of them we came up with a total of six to seven people who had to be reclassified. The issue was not as widespread. The main issue we found in the construction sector were people who were on sites and claiming social welfare while they were working. The self-employment issue was not as big as one would have thought.

In the meat sector we came across 40 self-employed workers and three of them ended up having to be reclassified to employment status.

These were the sectors we started off from. The media and journalism sector came into our purview because, to be fair to RTÉ, it did a voluntary self-disclosure within the Eversheds' report and that is what brought this into our purview. That report was published in 2018 or 2019, which is why we started the investigation in 2020.

The airline sector has been one we have been engaging with for a long time and it is a long legal process.