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

Again, I genuinely thank the Minister for those commitments and his engagement and interest on the issue. I will make one or two other brief supplementary points for his consideration. There has been much talk about the possibility of a collective agreement as a way of resolving this. I will point out that the producers to whom I refer, and the people who support no change in the situation and who were defending thestatus quoin terms of denying responsibility for employment, essentially refused to go to the forum for stakeholders that was agreed by the Oireachtas joint committee. They refused and, effectively, vetoed that forum.

One way to resolve it is for the Minister to have the forum, to have everybody in and to hear the case in front of independent people, like the Minister, who can hear the points and then adjudicate independently on it. There is intense lobbying coming from a certain sector that does not want the change. If it has nothing to hide, or if anybody else has nothing to hide, bring them all in and let us hear from them. Let us hear the different cases and make a fair and independent adjudication.

In terms of a collective agreement, no collective agreement is legally possible if we are not talking about the employer and employee. When there is reference to the Screen Producers Ireland, SPI, employment agreement or a collective agreement, SPI is a representative body and is not an employer. In fact, it is saying publicly that its members are not employers. Its members or it, as a body, cannot legally establish a collective agreement because it is saying it is not the employer. Only employers and employees can have a collective agreement. By the way, the Labour Court found in a recent hearing that these same producers were in breach of a collective agreement they had previously undertaken.

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