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

Will the Minister please get off the script and address what is a very serious issue? Currently, approximately 63,000 people are classified as being self-employed in construction, which accounts for about half of all construction workers. Are we seriously to believe that half of all those working in construction are entrepreneurs? I can tell the Minister they are not. If he wants examples, he should go out to the Gannon Homes site in Swords, a NAMA developer, where he will find people being misclassified as self-employed when they are not self-employed. They are not entrepreneurs; they are simply bricklayers being paid €100 a day. Similarly, this practice is going on at the Robswall site in Malahide just as it went on in Rhatigan's. It needs to be investigated but there seems to be no will on the MInister's part to ensure it is investigated. People who are clearly not self-employed subcontractors are being employed by builders in order for those builders to avoid paying PRSI, holiday pay and tax for those employees. The result of this practice is that Revenue is losing possibly hundreds of millions of euro in tax revenue each year because people are being misclassified. This is tax fraud. It is a criminal offence and the Minister has shown no interest in tackling it.

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