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

I am glad there is some response from the Government and the authorities in the form of these raids, which should be happening on a much bigger scale and should have been happening a long time ago. During the Celtic tiger period, they just were not happening at all and many workers lost out very bitterly as a result of that. Those who stood up for themselves, who fought and protested were often derided, blacklisted and denied the right to work. I am glad that there has been a bit of an improvement but it is still rife, if not rampant.

While there are building contractors who play straight up and do things as they should be done, there are also many cowboys out there who are abusing workers and almost certainly doing shoddy work because they do not want to pay building workers properly. They think, because of the transient nature of construction work, they can get away with it. It is being done on a wide scale and the very tiny amounts of tax revenue that are coming back from the RCT sector in construction as against ten times that amount in the PAYE sector for the same amount of workers is a clear indication of the abuse that is going on. We need far more enforcement in this area. Any big contractor who is found guilty of abusing workers' rights and the tax code in this way should never again be awarded public contracts. This has to be wiped out so that people like Billy and his colleagues in the construction industry, who have had to fight week in and week out against this kind of abuse by cowboy contractors, will no longer have to do that and can just get on with their jobs.

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