Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

In the past few months, a number of women have stood up and identified sexual harassment and bullying at the highest reaches of the cultural institutions. It takes great strength and confidence to do that because in Ireland, normally, when one speaks out, it means career suicide. These women have done a massive service to people everywhere and we applaud them.

It is amazing that it took them to go to the national newspapers to achieve justice and to protect them from harassment and bullying. It shows that there is a clear problem that the laws and the regulations in this country are not working.

On each occasion, the relevant Ministers have hidden behind employment law, highlighting it and stating there are regulatory bodies, such as the Workplace Relations Commission, to deal with this problem. That argument misses the point. The arts sector does not operate the same as other employment sectors. It is hammered with precarious working conditions and these precarious working conditions are accentuating the power differentials between management and employees which, in my view, is leading in certain cases to a septic culture of abuse.

Irish Equity recently released a survey of the theatre sector. It found that 60% of those surveyed stated that they were bullied and 75% of those people stated they did not report it as they feared it would jeopardise their employment. These are shocking figures. They are all the more shocking given that the Government is one of the main investors and funders of that sector. The Government has even more of a responsibility to ensure that the funding is being spent properly and fairly and is creating a workplace that is free from bullying etc.

I understand that Ms Karan O'Loughlin of Irish Equity met the Arts Council in 2016 with some of these details. She put it to the Arts Council that it needed to be part of the solution to these problems. I understand, from what Ms O'Loughlin has said, that the Arts Council stated at that stage that it was none of its business and it did not have a role in this regard.

It is the responsibility of the Government to ensure that wherever people work in any sector is a harassment and bullying-free zone. That is really important. All this legislation seeks to do is to tie the investment the State makes in these theatre groups etc. to fulfilling their responsibility to workers and for workers' rights. It is as simple as that.

I urge the Government to support it.

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