Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I had asked in my amendment No. 13, which I cannot move, that the limit be increased to €50,000. That would take a very large number of retired public servants out of the public service pension reduction. It would leave those who were on very high salaries in the first place, who would be on a pension over that amount, not exempt. That is fair enough. We are not here to look after the people who had exceptionally large salaries. The Minister could have gone a little further than €34,132. Their argument is that because of their age they have limited time left and feel that the three-year wait is harder on them because of their age and many of them may not be around to get the benefit of the three years. Even those who are, when they get to the end of the three years they do not know where they stand at that stage as it will be subject to a future agreement. It creates uncertainty for older people.

They highlight the fact that the USC deduction applies to all public service pensions, so they have to pay USC on their public service pension but there is an exclusion for people on the State pension, which is only right. Given that they are on a public service pension in lieu of the State contributory pension it is unfair they should have to pay the USC, whereas those on the State pension may be in receipt of a similar or greater amount, depending on the number of years service. They stress that some of this has a disproportionate effect on female pensioners because many were on lower incomes from the start and, by definition, are on lower pensions and may be caught for USC, based on their pensions which would not happen if they were on the State contributory pension. Those are some of the points I would like addressed and, in particular, the fact that they felt excluded from the whole process, even though the Minister said previously they did not have an association represented at the talks. Some members of Government parties would have told them that it would be illegal for them to be at the talks. That was actually stated to these people when we met them in Buswells a couple of weeks ago. I said that was nonsense and that we would move on from that. The reason given to them was that the Lansdowne Road agreement was about pay talks not pension talks so that they had no business there. Any agreement can be what one wants it to be and it could have included pensions. It is a very fine argument. I think the Minister can understand the difficulty pensioners are in; they were not allowed participate. There are quite a number of them. We talked about retired gardaí and some of those who might be marginally over the €34,000. They feel that a little more would have meant they would be exempt and would preserve the principle of not reversing the public service pension reduction for people on very high pensions. None of us is in the mood to have that debate here at this stage. I would like to get a response to the points made.