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

In order to have that relationship between employer and employee somebody has to be the employer, but the people who are getting the money are saying they are not employers. This is the point. It is so elementary and it has to be addressed. Screen Producers Ireland is like the film branch of IBEC. It has no entitlement to making an agreement for an industry, particularly when its members say they have no employees. How can it have an industry agreement when its members say that? It is not just about this individual case. Screen Producers Ireland's representative made it clear that the argument it was making on this case applied across the board, regardless of who it was, because its members do not have employees. Therefore, an employment relationship is not possible.

The Minister mentioned skills and training. Imagine a painter who had been working since 2015, thinking he was an apprentice who had accumulated his years in an apprenticeship. The Minister knows how apprenticeships work. This person works away thinking he will be qualified as a painter in four years. This person had been working since 2015 and his worksheets show he was working 70 or 80 hours a week, which is against the law. He then lost his job because he got injured on the job and the producer did not want to take responsibility for that. He then found out he was not an apprentice painter at all, so all that time is gone. Providing skills and training is lip service. People are going to courses but they do not get any accreditation and there are no apprenticeships. This cannot be allowed and it is not allowed in other jurisdictions. It is not allowed in the EU. If cases were taken to the EU courts, and maybe that is where this is going to have to go, they would call out this stuff.

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