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

Section 481 relief is state aid. Therefore, it has to comply with EU directives in this area. People cannot negotiate away their rights. They cannot do that. They are not allowed to do it. I want the Minister to understand the point I am making. People cannot negotiate away their rights. No group that claims to represent the industry can negotiate away their rights. I will send the Minister some of the correspondence from Equity, the Film Workers Association and the writer I quoted briefly who made the same point. They say that the law is not being complied with. This is not an allegation. The Minister has to investigate if there is even a possibility of it being true that either the law or the EU directive regarding state aid are not being complied with.

The point about the DAC is that everything survives the DAC except the employment relationship. This is the only thing that does not survive. This is the evidence we have from the producers. It is not an allegation; they have admitted it. They state no employment relationship can survive the DAC. The fixed-term workers' directive and the Act require that the employment relationship goes beyond the DAC.

That is the point of it. It is to protect people who are in episodic employment relationships. The other thing that survives the DAC is intellectual property, but it accrues to the producer company and not to the people who own it. That is a breach of the copyright directive. One cannot finance a structure that is being used to break the law.

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