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

I welcome the Minister's engagement and the commitments he just made. I have given him some new information, which I hope he will follow up. The letter, which he would have got today, elaborates on that.

There is Orwellian, Janus-faced double-speak coming from the producers that are getting the relief. In order to get the money, they are telling the Minister that they will do certain things. They are not just quietly not doing them and breaking their commitments, though. Rather, they are breaking them publicly. Their representative from Screen Producers Ireland has given witness evidence in court against workers to the effect that the recipients of section 481 relief could never be anyone's employer. This is a serious abuse. The same producer companies are getting the relief year after year.

The consequences for the workers are serious. If the continuity of service provided by someone whom the respondent agreed had been working on productions associated with it for ten years did not make the producer the employer, it means the employee's pension rights are messed up.

The Unfair Dismissals Act does not apply to them. Rights they have by law simply disappear because a producer who gets the relief sets up a designated activity company, DAC, then says he or she has nothing to do with any of these things or the employees in the DAC. It is shocking. The consequence is not just for those workers, but for delivering on the creation of an industry with a permanent, developing and trained pool of workers - the crew one needs to make films and, indeed, attract investment to film.

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