Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Apart from Senator Gavan and Senator Nash himself, I think the rest of us are all based in Dublin. At the same time, I do not want to prolong the debate too much. I will let Senator Nash listen to my contribution. It is important that this has been brought up, and I thank Senator Nash for doing so. It is important for those who are a little worried about the idea of it, such as employer organisations, that the Bill contains measures to counter false self-employment, that it is about bogus self-employment, and that it is not about trying to rule out self-employment, get rid of people or make it more difficult for self-employed people. It is about the position where people are being asked to make themselves self-employed but the power dynamic between the person paying for the service and person providing the service is much more on the side of the person paying. That will always be the case to a certain extent. He who pays the piper calls the tune to a certain extent. That said, it is about the flexibility about when a person turns up, how he or she turns up, if that person can go missing for three days and come in when it suits him or her to do the job, or if that person is doing a certain number of hours every week. When I was doing my accountancy exams a long time ago, we talked about contracts of service compared with contracts for service. If a person had a contract of service, he or she was an employee, was supposed to turn up for certain hours and was supposed do whatever was asked to be done in the job specification, contract and so on. A self-employed person would come along and do a task, perhaps very frequently, but it would be on that person's terms more than it would be on the terms of the person paying for it. There is vagueness there and will always be vagueness there.

While this Bill is not in my area of expertise or portfolio, I read the explanatory memorandum, have notes on it and am familiar with the topic. There are people who will have worked on construction sites and who will have been there all the time, as tilers, carpenters or plumbers. They will not have been fellows who turned up, did a particular task and left. They will have been there full-time, all day, every day, for months on end, but they will not have had that protection if they were sick. As people have pointed out, with the average industrial wage being approximately €37,500, there may be approximately a €5,000 difference between what the State gets from self-employed people and others, rising to approximately €8,000 for somebody on €60,000 a year. I do not think the Social Insurance Fund should be called PRSI any more because it is not just related to pay any more but also to dividends, interest, rental income and anything else one might have. It is based on a person's entire income. We will discuss class K PRSI some other day, which is a meaningless status with regard to getting any pay related social insurance. My party supports this Bill because it is about tackling bogus self-employment. It is trying to tackle people who are put in a position where they are on somebody else's terms, to which they must sign up and for which they do not get benefits if they are sick or other things such as holiday pay. Senator Humphreys made a point about RTÉ. The top ten highest paid people who work for RTÉ are nearly all not employees. I do not think they are the people we are worried about with regard to bogus self-employment, but there is probably a lot of employer's PRSI not being paid on those various contracts. While I do not think those are the people we are worried about, who are almost working full-time, if there is discussion about rules for bogus self-employment, they should probably cover such areas.

I went through the explanatory memorandum. Senator Nash spoke for approximately 12 minutes on it and Senator Humphreys for another five or six on top of it. I agree with it, we agree with it, and I think the Minister of State is allowing it to go to Committee Stage. I think we should let it go to Committee Stage. I am sure there are things to be refined in the drafting and so on, like on Committee Stage of all Bills. I think we have probably passed the boat for pre-legislative scrutiny by now since we are in the House with the Bill. Let it go to Committee Stage. I will not delay it. We support the thrust of the Bill.