Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and I thank the Senator Mullen for bringing forward the Bill. It is mind-boggling stuff. There have been some very confusing narratives. There are issues of the barter account, of agents who wield great influence on our public service broadcaster and the tension in the model between the commercial and public service pillars is very much under the spotlight. It is funny. I have referred to Bob Quinn here before - going back decades - on children’s advertising and the stand that he took in that regard and that others have since taken over the years in RTÉ about that tension. Here we are again looking at the tension between the commercial and public service aspects.

I welcome the Minister’s investigations. We have seen many people who would like to use this moment as an opportunity to tear apart RTÉ. There have been reports about sell-offs. I do not think there is any merit in those reports but there is an argument that people in RTÉ should not be able to touch anything that moves until the Minister’s investigations are complete.

There are a couple of issues I have raised at various committees that I want to put on the record again today. This is an opportunity for us to draw a line in the sand on bogus self-employment. RTÉ has such a tarnished record on employment law, and bogus self-employment in particular. There is no justification for treating workers as companies. These are people who work under the control and direction of RTÉ. They work exclusively for RTÉ and meet all the criteria of employees but they are treated as companies. Bogus self-employment is the other side of the coin of being allowed to set up one’s own company. Celebrities or high earners are allowed to set themselves up as companies. While that is happening, RTÉ is treating ordinary workers as self employed. Those workers do not get the benefit of special deals. In her opening statement to the media committee earlier, Siún Ní Raghallaigh said she is deeply unhappy at the evident pattern of inconsistency and the lack of completeness in the provision of information to date by the executive. That is nothing new. As I said earlier, in April 2021, RTÉ misled the Committee of Public Accounts on five occasions at the same meeting during a discussion on bogus self-employment. Today it tells us there are 500 individuals involved in the investigation by the Department of Social Protection into bogus self-employment. Some 60% of examinations by the State have resulted in decisions to reclassify self-employed workers as employees. RTÉ must have a pretty large contingent liability provided for in money that might be owed to Revenue if there are 500 individuals involved in this investigation. That is one issue in respect of which a line needs to be drawn in the sand. I previously called for the top 100 salaries across the organisation to be published and not just those of on-air presenters. Today I called for details relating to the lower end of the salary scale to be published in order that we might get a sense of the culture and the differential that exists between the top earners in the organisation and the lower earners.

There are areas of the Bill about which I have concerns. We will not oppose the Bill. We do not believe the discussion should be postponed for 12 months, but there are areas that are impractical. While we support the reduction of salaries, and have called for this for a long time, there are areas in respect of which we have questions. Certainly, we need to rebalance RTÉ from personalities to public service. We know that a Private Members' Bill takes a very long time in terms of its passage through the Houses of Oireachtas. We want to continue this conversation and we will not oppose it today.