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

I move amendment No. 14:

In page 79, between lines 18 and 19, to insert the following: "33.Within three months of the passing of this Act, the Minister shall lay a report before the Dáil, on the functioning of section 481 relief for investment in films, particularly in relation to the degree to which it is meeting the requirement to meet "quality employment and training" and to examine whether film producer companies in receipt of the relief are hiding behind short lived designated activity companies (DAC) to avoid taking responsibility for workers employed on film productions supported by the relief.".

This amendment relates to the film tax relief available under section 481 of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997. I am proposing that we have a proper look at whether the relief is delivering on the conditions that are attached to it to provide quality employment and training, which is the legal requirement of those who receive it.

I have raised this issue many times with the Minister and I acknowledge that he has changed some of the rules, including the introduction of a requirement that the film producer companies in receipt of the relief give an undertaking that they are complying with employment legislation and so on. However, as I have pointed out, those companies are not, in fact, respecting the rights of workers and are not fulfilling the conditions of section 481. They get the relief specifically and only if they provide quality employment and training, which means they must take responsibility for the people employed to work on the films they produce. However, when workers are treated badly, or feel they have been treated badly, when they have been dismissed or not re-employed by these film producers or where collective agreements are not honoured, and they take cases to the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, the same people who take money from the Government on the basis that they will provide quality employment and training go into the WRC and say, "We could not possibly have an employment relationship with this person." That is really serious.

To give an example, a case was taken to the Labour Court against Element Pictures by a stagehand who worked for the company, which has taken millions of euro in relief over many years, takes money from Screen Ireland and gives the Minister undertakings that it will provide quality employment and training. The CEO of the company told the court: "I wish to illustrate to the court how the specific working arrangements in the production sector prevent a relationship of employment from having existed between the parties." These people are going into the Labour Court and WRC and saying they could not possibly have an employment relationship with the person taking the case, who has worked on a film that is funded by section 481. If there is nothing else the Minister will do, I appeal to him or his officials to go to the WRC when some of these cases are being taken. The people in the film production companies are speaking out of both sides of their mouth. At the same hearing, a representative of Screen Producers Ireland - I am not sure why a representative body for producers was represented at the hearings - said:

I will give further evidence to the court that there is no possible basis, having due regard to the realities of the sector, on which a relationship can be said to have existed between the parties hereto. This is on the basis of the clearly established industry norms and practices governing working arrangements in this sector, including in the operation of section 481.

The representatives of the film producer companies, which are in receipt of €60 million, €70 million or €80 million of section 481 relief a year, are taking the money and saying they will provide employment and then going into the WRC and saying not only is the person not their employee but they could never be their employee because the industry prevents the companies from being an employer. They are saying they are not an employer, which cannot be the case. They get the money to provide employment and then say they do not create any employment and do not have any employees. How do they manage this trick and how does the Government let them get away with it?

The same applies in respect of skills training. A case is being taken at the moment by an apprentice painter who has worked on successive films for Metropolitan Films but was dismissed because he got injured on set. He thought he was an apprentice painter but when he went to question how he could be dismissed, he discovered there was no accreditation. He has been working for several years as an apprentice but is not, in fact, an apprentice, because the company is registered with nobody and there is no qualification process. He is not only out of a job because the construction manager got rid of him but he does not have the three years of qualifications he thought he had and could take somewhere else. He may as well never have been a painter.

This has been going on for years and I have been saying it for years. As I pointed out to the Minister, some of the witnesses who came into the Oireachtas committee in 2018 and raised these points have never worked again in the industry, even though they had a long history of working for the same companies that receive the section 481 relief. I appeal to him to look at this issue. Let us remember that only a few years ago, back in 2018, the film producer companies told the Oireachtas committee there were 17,000 jobs resulting from section 481.

When the Minister examined it - and fair play to him for doing so - in the tax strategy papers, we discovered there were only 2,000 jobs. That is a big difference. It was scrutinised and there were 2,000 jobs. In none of those jobs does the worker accumulate any rights as an employee. Under the operation of law, the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act 2003 confers rights on the workers in this sector who work for the same employer, even if they work from project to project. They are working for the same producer company that is collecting the money, albeit behind different designated activity companies, DACs. That is, of course, how the companies get away with this three-card trick. They say “I'm not the employer, it is the DAC”, even though they set it up and a wholly owned subsidiary of the producer company collects the relief. This is a scam to get away with taking no responsibility for the people who work in this industry.

I will finish on this point. We saw the problem with not having proper regulation of this industry with the Alec Baldwin issue, when somebody got shot and killed on a set in the United States. It was discovered that people were working excessive hours and so on. The apprentice I mentioned earlier in this contribution was being asked to work massively excessive hours.

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