RTÉ has confirmed that Fair City will continue to air throughout the summer despite production halting on the soap in July and August.

It comes as an Oireachtas Committee was told that Fair City actors feel like “second class citizens” and their show is an “easy target” when money needs to be saved.

Unions representing workers across the national broadcaster appeared at the Oireachtas Media Committee on Wednesday to discuss governance and culture issues at RTÉ.

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A large proportion of the committee hearing focused on “bogus self-employment”. The Department of Social Protection is currently investigating whether or not 695 RTÉ workers should have been misclassified as self-employed. This included some Fair City actors.

Teresa Hannick from SIPTU told the Committee that actors on the soap have “only recently become RTÉ employees” but they “do not have a contract of indefinite duration, despite some of them being on the drama for over 20 years”.

Ms Hannick also said that people working on the soap have been informed that there will be “no filming in July and August of this year”.

“This is happening so that management can use the technical staff to cover the 2024 European Football Championship, the Paris Olympic Games, and the GAA Championship, all of which require huge resources,” Ms Hannick said.

“This is a new development that has never happened previously, even though RTÉ has broadcasted these major sporting events before.

“The national broadcaster has a duty, under its public service broadcasting remit, to produce drama like Fair City.

“Our members in Irish Equity are extremely disappointed and distressed with this reduction in filming and they believe that RTE management consider them second-class employees and expendable if savings need to be made.

“It could seem to an outside observer that when money needs to be saved, Fair City and drama are easy targets.”

A spokeswoman for RTÉ confirmed to the Irish Mirror that Fair City will continue to run throughout the summer.

“Fair City reduced on air from four to three episodes a week from January 2024 to allow for a pause in production in July and August,” she said.

“However, we have continued to produce four episodes per week, while airing three, which will allow new episodes of Fair City to continue to air throughout the summer months. The exact schedule will be confirmed in the coming weeks."

Emma O’Kelly, RTÉ’s Education Correspondent, meanwhile, told the Committee that there was a stage during the summer when the spending scandal was engulfing RTÉ that she did not know if she would recommend someone to work for the national broadcaster. However, Ms O’Kelly, who is also a staff rep for the National Union of Journalists, said she no longer feels like this.

However, she said that while there are looming cuts coming at the broadcaster, people are already losing their jobs.

Ms O’Kelly said: “I was contacted last week by a worker in RTÉ who told me that after six years working in the organisation, he has been told, ‘That's it, goodbye. It's over’.

“He says, ‘I have given six years of my life to this organisation. And that's it, I'm gone.

“It’s present tense, it is not future.”

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