Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent)
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I thank Mr. Fives for that curt answer which may be true but no one else has that luxury that DSP would allow it. Nobody else does and the social welfare payments would be stopped for an ordinary person who is on unemployment benefit. This is the problem and they do not get it.

As Mr. Bakhurst mentioned public accounts, I think it was in 2019 all this evidence was presented to the Committee of Public Accounts again and the Department were well aware and are well aware of it yet nothing happened. The Committee of Public Accounts, that everybody seems to have massive respect for, brought all this to the fore about this bogus self employment, tax evasion and the corrupt practices that were going on. This all came before PAC and unfolded in these committee rooms but nothing was done about it. Absolutely zilch was done about it, nothing. The Secretaries General of the Department of social welfare and Revenue have a lot of questions to answer and they need to answer them because they are public, paid officials and law is being broken on an hourly basis when these bogus self employed people are in RTÉ. It is not only in RTÉ, to be fair, they are in a lot of other areas as well. This is all been done with ICTU and as I said all the employer organisations are in this together.

A massive plan was laid to evade tax at an enormous scale and that has happened. The saddest part of all this is the workers ag obair go crua in RTÉ who now have no pensions.