Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister states that robust measures are in place to deal with this. I am certainly not aware of those robust measures and they do not seem to apply in Limerick, whatever about the rest of the country. When I asked people what did they do, somebody who approached the Revenue Commissioners was told it was a matter for the employer. As for approaching the scope section, if the scope section is to deal with all of those thousands of people, it will be overwhelmed. In any case, the Minister will find that in most cases workers are compelled to sign a piece of paper to say that they are now self-employed. There is no point in going to the scope section if one has already signed a piece of paper. They do that on pain of losing their employment.

In any case, if they do not do so, they will not get the jobs at all. I disagree with the conclusions reached by the report prepared by the Departments of Employment Affairs and Social Protection and Finance. A report with which we were circularised recently by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, pointed out that in the past ten years there has been a 23% increase in the number of the self-employed working without employees. The report to which the Minister referred involved an inspection which was carried out around the country and involved interviews of 11,699 people. One in ten, the report found, was bogus self-employed, and it very specifically stated that those who carried out the interviews were convinced they were not being told the full truth. This is a serious problem. The Minister says the figures are consistent with the EU's, which may or may not be the case, but the fact that something wrong is happening in the EU is no justification for it happening at the same rate here. It is a real problem. I deal with real people who are affected by this and I am sure other Deputies have the same experience. Many of them work for subcontractors employed by the State. The money is all coming from the State. When I raise the matter with the relevant Ministers - not Deputy Doherty, but other Ministers - they just do not want to know. They say it is none of their business, "nothing to see here, move along", but it is happening and is causing real hardship. Genuine employees are being-----

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