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

This is the section that arms the Government to harass people into whatever jobs it feels they should be forced to take up. This work will, in most cases, be low-paid and this measure will be directed against the people who have been hardest hit by the pandemic. These include groups some of us in this House identified as really getting hammered by the Government a number of weeks ago including taxi drivers, arts workers and those who work in music and live entertainment. The Minister says she is very concerned about that sector. Those who work in live entertainment have explicitly told the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response that their main fear is that people will be driven out of the sector if they are not supported. They will be forced to leave the sector because they will not be able to survive. The Minister is making that more likely. She is hammering a sector that is already on its knees. That is pretty shameful.

She has not responded to the sector's pleas for help. Instead, she is whipping up bogeymen and scapegoats and encouraging the notion that there are many people out there scamming the system and that the State must arm itself against them. It is Fine Gael reverting to type. I am sorry to put it like that but there is deep prejudice at work. The vast majority of these people lost their jobs because of public health guidelines and want to go back to work in the sectors in which they previously worked. The Minister, however, wants to harass them.

It is already happening. Those in the arts were suffering a lot of this before. They were being pushed onto various courses and being hounded by Intreo and so on. We are now ready to step that stuff up again despite the important role these people played in sustaining us through this difficult period. A group of 4,000 musicians is now up in arms. Some have already had their payments cut. The Minister says this has not happened but it has. As a result of the way the Government has decided to calculate the reckonable income of self-employed people, they are deemed to have been earning less than €200 even though they were earning much more and their payments are consequently cut. That is what is happening to self-employed people such as lone traders, artists, musicians, taxi drivers and others. Their payments are being cut even though they were earning more than the threshold. People are being kicked when they are down. It is not fair and it is unjust. That is why we seek to delete this subsection.

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