Mr. Donnacha McKeon:

The Chair has what is stated in the tender, which obviously commits the Oireachtas and the service provider to abide by all relevant employment regulation. That is in the RFT. I manage the contract on behalf of the Oireachtas. In terms of the protections the employees have, when this dispute first came to light, there is a provision in the contract that the service provider will come to me and talk to me about any situation that could conceivably threaten the operation of the contract. We had a discussion in the middle of last year with regard to the fact there was an ongoing dispute. I have engaged with the management of the company on these questions. They have given me assurances, and gave the same assurances, I believe, to the WRC, that there are no zero-hour contracts, that the rates of pay are above the minimum wage and living wage and have been benchmarked to comparable roles in the industry. I believe that the same information has been submitted to the WRC.

I do not want to get into the middle of a dispute and I also do not want to get into their model of service, because there is an outstanding RFT. In terms of what they actually get, in their contract, as far as I am aware, they are given a minimum amount of work they will be offered and they can be offered more work beyond that. I have been given assurances that most of them are offered more work beyond that. At that stage of the game, there may be other jobs they are doing or another commitment they have to fulfil. I have been informed that does not in any way affect the offering of the next week's work.

As for how soon work is rostered, that actually depends on the rostering of the Houses and on the committees of the Houses. My Civil Service team and I cannot make a decision on what will be on Oireachtas TV the next week until we get the committee schedule and the Dáil and Seanad schedules. It is the same for Pi Comms in terms of rostering.