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

I remember bricklayers pointing out that the work that was being done was substandard and that it would lead to cracks in the building and the occurrence of damp within a very short period. Of course, lo and behold, that is exactly what happened. The qualified bricklayer who had experience and knew what work should be done to do those things properly, was outside the gate protesting because he could not get on the site, along with many other people, due to them being known union activists and the main contractor did not want them anywhere near the site. That was, by the way, building council houses. As a result of the fantastic campaigning of building workers and groups such as Building Workers against the Black Economy, eventually, after a couple of decades of campaigning by construction workers, there have been some improvements in trying to clamp down on the issue of bogus self-employment. However, there is no doubt in my mind that this contributed to the lack of health and safety and to the dangers and accidents, and indeed fatalities, on building sites. To have some licensing around that to ensure people are properly licensed to do the things they are supposed to be doing, is good but the big issue is enforcement; not just enforcement of these things but enforcement of workers rights on sites generally. There needs to be inspections that are meaningful, frequent, the inspectorates monitoring health and safety and workers rights issues, should be properly staffed and resourced, and there needs to be a proactive approach so that they can actually see and identify when there are pressures on from the employers to cut corners and to not do things correctly. Even if people have the right licence, they are being put under pressure to cut corners. We know that we have suffered terrible consequences because of cowboy builders. However, often builders who were considered respectable, were still getting public contracts, and were still in business, were actually building buildings that were totally defective because it was cheaper to do it using the wrong or cheap materials or by cutting corners and putting pressure on tradespeople who often knew the things they were doing were wrong and were going to have pretty serious consequences, or that there were major health and safety breaches going on on a regular basis on particular sites, but were terrified to say anything because they would be flung off the site or blacklisted if they said a word about those things. That is more important. I am not saying it is not helpful to streamline these things. However, as Deputy Smith said, there is a bit of an implication that it is up to the workers to have the licence rather than up to the Government to make sure these things are being checked and inspected, that workers' rights are being respected on construction sites, and that employers are not putting pressure on workers to do things they should not, or not do things they should do. That is absolutely key.

I would be interested to know whether the officials or the Minister of State considers that all of this should apply to other areas where construction activities are involved but which are not necessarily construction sites in the sense of physically building or refurbishing buildings. The particular instance I am thinking about is film sites where movies are made and where stages and sets are constructed. Will all of this apply to them? I am curious to know. The officials or the Minister of State may or may not know but I have a long-standing interest in the concerns that have been raised by film crew about the lack of proper rights and health and safety on film sets, even though public money is being used to finance film production in this country, which I welcome. Indeed, that funding, which is up to about €100 million per year, is supposed to be tied to quality employment and training and to compliance with all employment legislation. According to many film crew, that is not actually what is going on on the sets. Indeed, workers raise health and safety issues and the issue of working excessive and dangerous hours. Building a film set can also be a very dangerous business. Workers are doing many, if not all, of the same type of activities that are done when building buildings such as using dangerous equipment and so on. People are being made work excessive hours, in excess of what they should legally be required to do, and they are not getting the sort of time off that is necessary for them to recuperate and so on. These pose very serious health and safety risks but many of them say if a person says anything about these things, he or she will not be asked back to work on the next film and will be actively blacklisted, as many of them say they have been, because they raised issues such as health and safety. I am interested in that regard in the register that the Minister of State is talking about and how that would work because one of the things that has been very actively resisted by the film producer companies is actually having a proper register of the different grades of people who work in the film industry. Now that they have finally been sort of pressured into establishing some kind of register, the people who are essentially going to put that register together are the self-employed contractors who hire and fire the crew. These are the very people who often are guilty of forcing people to work excessive hours and blacklisting them if they say anything about what is happening on the film set or make any complaints or the like. It is terribly important in that regard that any register needs to be insulated from that kind of thing and from any pressure there might be from employers to use that register in a way that discriminates against people who might be raising questions about health and safety or employment rights issues on a set or a site. I will leave it at that. Those are a few questions to which I would like to hear a response.

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