Mr. Andrew Smith:

I thank Tom Parlon for some of the nice things he said about bricklayers and members of the construction industry. He is right. The construction industry is starting to recover at present. BATU and all the other unions very much welcome that. We keep up with the times. We are well aware that the major construction companies have changed, have become more management level and are using sub-contractors. We have embraced that too. I spoke about self-employment and I will not go over that again, but the problem we have is PAYE for workers. The member referred to piecework. I was a brickie all of my life and worked on piecework all of my life. I worked on piecework on a PAYE basis. The words "career", "future" and "livelihood" have been bandied around here with regard to the future of an apprentice, but if a young man rings me, tells me he would like to be an apprentice brickie and asks me what happens when he serves his time I will tell him he will be forced into self-employment. He will say he does not want that and that he wants to be able to go to a bank and borrow and so forth, so it will turn him off. We are seeing it reflected in the numbers.

As regards the diaspora, guys are ringing us in the union to ask if there is PAYE work available in Dublin. We have to tell them the truth, that it is not available in the majority of cases. The main companies are doing their business correctly, as Tom Parlon knows because they are members of the CIF and have been around for a long time. However, they are at a major competitive disadvantage because of what is taking place. All we are saying is that the industry should be policed. Young people will come back into it and we welcome that. We are not asking for anything else. We just want the industry to be policed properly, whether that is registered employment agreements, REAs, sectoral employment orders, SEOs, or PAYE. We are asking for Scope in the Department of Social Protection to get its inspectors out and about. That is all.