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

So the Government washes its hands of the matter. The Government is responsible for not reining in the obscene salaries, which everybody knew about, at the top of RTÉ, whether it was executives or a tiny number of overpaid presenters. Now, however, the people getting it in the neck are the skilled people - the ordinary workers. They are the ones who will lose their jobs and they will go into an independent private sector characterised by the gig economy and project-to-project work. I do not know how many times I have raised the insecurity that workers face in the rest of the audiovisual sector. The producers do very well, but the workers do not know if they have a job from one project to the next. We are going to go away from a situation where people have decent, relatively secure jobs, albeit not all of them because they had to fight and campaign against bogus self-employment and contract work.

What will happen to those contractors? Will they get redundancy payments? No, they will not. Will they have any guarantee of getting work on other programmes? No, they will not. Flagship programmes like "Fair City" and "The Late Late Show" will become more reliant on private advertisers and the commercial sector. This will undermine the fundamental ethos of public service broadcasting.

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