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

I appreciate the Minister's response and will take her up on her offer of help for a particular group of workers. We have engaged with the Department of Finance which is, in fairness, responding with regard to certain issues including the question of public funding and linking that to the vindication of rights. This issue actually cuts across several Departments, including the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection. Essentially, film producers who are in receipt of a lot of public money are saying that the fixed-term work legislation does not apply to the film industry. They are saying that the film industry is exceptional.

I was in Ardmore Studios last week in the company of around 50 film workers. Some of them have had 50 fixed-term contracts with the same producer or with a series of producers but they have no rights. Some of them appeared before an Oireachtas Committee in January of last year and said that there were abuses of their rights and of the conditions attached to public funding in the film industry and not one of them has worked since then. This is absolutely outrageous. There is a notion abroad that the film industry is exceptional and that the normal rules do not apply to it. This needs to be investigated in a serious way.

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