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

This is what happens when a Finance Bill is guillotined. We end up with a shambolic Committee Stage where there is no actual scrutiny of the Bill and everyone is forced to try to shoehorn in any points they want to make into the first grouping of amendments. That is what has happened today. People have no choice at this stage. There is very little time left. They want to raise issues and had there been proper scrutiny of the Bill, we would not have this. Certain people who spent a lot of time talking would not even have gone down to a committee meeting because it is not the Dáil Chamber, not in front of the cameras really, so they would not have bothered. We all know who would and would not have been there to do proper scrutiny of the Bill.

Anyway, we are where we are. There is very little time left. As a mover of an amendment in this grouping, I have made the main arguments. The argument we are making is that the USC was supposed to be an emergency, temporary tax, which was always unfair because workers paid the bill for the crimes of bankers and developers. It was never fair but that is why it was introduced. Workers picked up the bill for the crimes of others. As bad as that was, it was supposed to be temporary. The promises to get rid of it and that it would only be temporary have been reneged upon and workers are still having this imposed on them. Now we are told it is unrealistic to get rid of it. How can it be unrealistic to get rid of something that the Government itself stated it would get rid of? Pretty much anyone who is being in any way objective would say it was unfair in the first place and resulted only from the fact that there was a financial crash that was generated by the banks and developers and the politicians who allowed them to run riot in the housing sector.

By the way, talking about the current housing crisis, it would not exist were it not for all the crimes that were committed back then and the politicians who facilitated them. The workers paid the bill via the USC and the working people of this country paid the bill with the housing crisis that persists. It gets worse every day and there is no sign anywhere on the horizon that it will be fixed any time soon. That is the consequence. It seems to me that a Government with a record surplus kind of owes it to the working people to make up for all the pain they had to take and to try to resolve those problems and address that inequity. The people who caused the crash and the housing crisis are making profits again. The banks are back making big profits. The property developers, many of the well known names can be seen plastered around Dublin on building sites, are back making big money again on massively overpriced property that no ordinary person can afford. Would it not be fair for them to pay tax on their excess wealth in excess of €4.7 million? That is the proposal for the wealth tax we and groups such as Oxfam have put forward. The 20,000 people who have more than €4.7 million in personal wealth would pay a little tax on that and that would pay to get rid of the USC for workers who earn less than €100,000. It seems fair and entirely realistic to do that.

Do not tell me - this is the Government's argument - that they would run for the hills as they would lack incentives. Where are the incentives for the nurses, teachers, the ushers and service officers in here or the tens of thousands of public servants or retail workers in this country? I was looking at the figures from the CSO on average earnings in different sectors of the economy. For those who work in food or retail, average earnings are €10,000 per year. For those who work in the arts, average earnings are €16,000 per year. Hundreds of thousands of working people are living in poverty. We proposed a refundable tax credit for those 20% of workers who earn less than €18,750 per year because they do not benefit from tax credits. We said they should have a refundable tax credit. That could also be paid for with a little bit of wealth tax, to actually help the working poor, of whom there are hundreds of thousands. It is not unrealistic to say we could do that. Do what we promised: get rid of the USC, be fair to workers who had that imposed on them and ask the multimillionaires to pay a little extra tax so that working people can get some reward for the work they do.

In the short time available, I will mention another amendment we will not get to, as others have done. It relates to the film tax credit. As we speak today, there are film workers before the Labour Court, some of whom have worked 25 years, some 30, some 35 and some 40 years in the film industry. It is as though it never happened, however, apart from the fact that their names are on the credits of the films for all of those years.

It did happen. They did work on those films and the Government subsidised the production of the films through section 481 and its predecessor, section 35. The film workers, who are in the Labour Court at the moment fighting for the recognition of their service to the industry over all those decades, estimate that since 1984, when the first of these film tax credits was brought in, about €4.5 billion has gone to the film producers. These credits go to the companies of the film producers. In Ireland, that is dominated by a handful of film companies. The big names include Metropolitan Films, World 2000 Entertainment Limited, Element Pictures and so on. They are the biggest recipients and beneficiaries of the section 481 film tax credit, which is now running at about €100 million a year.

Does the Minister know what the shocking thing is? Let us take Metropolitan Films as an example, but Element Pictures is the same. When the workers who have worked for them on successive productions for decades go into the Workplace Relations Commission or the Labour Court and say they have worked on five, ten, 15 or 20 films that were made by Metropolitan Films and they have been unfairly blacklisted and dismissed from the industry, Metropolitan Films or Element Pictures says it is not the workers' employer. The designated activity company, DAC, which was set up for that film production is their employer. Metropolitan Films accepts that it set up the DAC, but that is different. The State gives the film producer - Metropolitan, Element or whatever it might be - the money. The film producer sets up a DAC for the film and then disassociates itself from the DAC and says it does not employ anybody. The consequence is that people who have spent 20, 30 or 40 years in the industry have no recognition of service whatsoever because they are employed by these DACs, even though they are associated companies wholly owned by the company the Minister gives the money to.

Under any objective view of company law and the relationship between companies, subsidiaries and so on, these DACs are subsidiaries of the companies the Minister gives the money to, and he gives the money to them specifically for the provision of quality employment, what is called the industry development test. In fact, the European Union only allows the Minister to give money to the film producers under state aid rules on the basis that he will create an industry and provide quality employment and training, but the people he gives it to say they do not have any employees. He gives it to them to create employment and then when the employees say the producers are their employer, they say they do not have employees. It is as if they never existed in the industry.

There is no industry, but €4.5 billion has gone to these film companies since 1984. Workers, therefore, are totally vulnerable. They can basically be blacklisted out of the industry if they say boo on a film set or if they say they do not want to work dangerously excessive hours or assert their right under the fixed-term workers Act to carry their service from one film production to another. If they do that, they will be blacklisted and then when they go to the Labour Court about their blacklisting, they will be told the production company is not their employer and, in fact, nobody knows who their employer is or that it is a DAC that briefly existed and then disappeared.

That is outrageous and this Government has allowed it to happen. Successive governments have allowed it to happen. I do not know how many times I have spoken about this to various Ministers for Finance and it just carries on and on. There is simply no protection for the workers. There is a very simple solution to this issue, which was proposed by the Committee on Budgetary Oversight. It is that the Minister would set down as a precondition of giving the money to the film producers that they acknowledge the service of workers who have worked across different DACs as their employees if they were set up by the same producer company. It is simple. If the Minister does not do that, the fixed-term workers Act means nothing and the workers have absolutely no rights, no recognition of service and might as well not have existed. As they put it, the clock goes back to zero in terms of their employment record at the end of every film production. It is as if they never worked before in the industry, even though they have worked in it for decades. That leaves them totally vulnerable.

The other group demanding reform by the Minister of section 481 includes the actors, performers, writers and directors, that is, the people who actually do the performance or create the performance with their writing or direction. They have repeatedly said to the Minister, or his predecessors, that they are not getting fair and reasonable remuneration for their performances because they are forced to sign buyout contracts where the downstream revenues those films generate accrue to the producers, even though their performances, under copyright directives and legislation, should mean they benefit from downstream revenues. In other words, they should not just be given a once-off payment and forced to sign away their rights to the downstream revenues of a film if it does well. In that sense, films are unusual because it is not just a case of getting paid for the work on the day. If a film is very successful, as some Irish films are, they then potentially generate revenue for years. At the moment, workers are being told they will not get on a film unless they sign a buyout contract where they have to waive their right to the downstream revenues and if they dare to question that, they will not get on the film. That is it. That is a breach of their rights under the copyright legislation. It also states in EU directives that buyout contracts are supposed to be the exception, not the rule. In Ireland, they are the rule.

That also means Irish actors, writers and performers are on lesser contracts than, for example, their UK counterparts under the PACT Equity agreement. They have asked repeatedly that the Government insist that film producers use the PACT Equity agreement used in Britain as the blueprint for the contract for writers, actors, performers and others on film productions. The Minister can crack that whip because he gives them the money. It should be very simple. He can just say they are not getting the money unless they recognise the service of the crew, give them their rights and ensure that writers, actors, performers and directors will benefit from the downstream revenues of their performances or their creative contribution to those film productions.

I remind the Minister of what I said earlier. Most artists, writers, directors and performers live in poverty. Most people who work in arts in this country live in poverty, not the film producers, but the people who do most of the work. I appeal to the Minister to make those changes to section 481, which I have asked for many times. More importantly, the people who work in the film industry and the writers and directors have asked repeatedly that those changes be made. The workers will end up in court because, again, Metropolitan Films said today that it is not their employer, even though it set up the company that employed them or that it says employed them, but actually it was Metropolitan saying it is not their employer. The company knows them well. They have worked on all its film productions. It is laughable, shocking and disgraceful, but it goes on. I will leave it at that. I know other Members wish to contribute.

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