Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The last couple of sentences summed up what I wanted to say. I ask those present to pardon me as my voice is a bit compromised. Since I have got to know this group of people who are working on the need for their voices to be heard, it really has brought things home to me. An awful lot of these people are public sector and semi-State workers who saw their pensions hit so hard, particularly during the austerity years. They are the people who built the State and who stayed in jobs for 40 or more years, sometimes 45 or more years. They stayed in these jobs and were dedicated to them. When they retired, they were told they were worthless pieces of whatever and did not have any voice at the table when something as fundamental as the income they have to live on when they are older was being stripped down. It is slightly different from my own experience but nevertheless, and I say this in response to Deputy Bruton's questions, pensions are often used in pay negotiations for employers to get a result that is favourable to them. If they are going to give an increase of 5% or 10%, they look to cut things off other bits. It is a way of tailoring their costs and their responsibilities. I - mea culpa- was party to such negotiations as a young woman, and without realising it I was willing to just say "yes, cut the pension, so what?. It did not matter to me and I probably did not stay in this job and neither did my mates.

To not have a pension or be at the table to say what that would do to the retired workers in their day-to-day, week-to-week life, is a real injustice. What the core of this Bill is trying to do is to address an historic injustice. In this case, the disregard shown to over half a million retired workers when their pension scheme is altered or subject to change during negotiations is just unacceptable. In this day and age, when we are dealing with climate Bills and all sorts of challenges we always talk about justice, transition, voices at tables and inclusion, which is a great new modern word, but this is a cohort of people who are deliberately excluded. It has been a very dramatic experience in their lives over the last few years.

As we can all see, none of us is getting any younger but the people who have worked so hard on this who are sitting around the table need this to be moved on at a better pace than it has been. Deputy Stanton said that there is lots of legislation before this committee and I understand that. I am on a similar committee where we deal with lots of legislation but we need to try to move this on. My appeal today is that this committee should try to understand and be clear that the intent of this Bill is to address an historic injustice. It is open to amendment. We are not saying "that is it; we will accept nothing less than this". The effect of the Bill will be to change one simple fact, namely that up to six months after someone leaves work they have a forum to go to. The Bill would change it so that six months after a change is proposed to be made to a person's pension scheme, he or she is allowed to be party to negotiation consultation and arbitration.

I want to thank the Office of Parliamentary Legal Advisers, OPLA, who are very experienced and good drafters of Bills and who worked for a year helping to draft this Bill. Their patience and experience was important in this. They were in no way sloppy in how they looked at this. They took the core of the issues around which we need to get pension organisations and their representatives around the table when their own pension schemes are being changed due to pension negotiations by employers and others. That is really important. In doing that, they took into account how they needed to redefine what an industrial dispute looked like and what a retired worker looked like. All that is in the Bill, which has 13 sections and it is dealt with in a detailed way. I ask the committee to take this seriously and not to think that these people have no skin in the game; they absolutely do. To have one's voice listened to is important whether people realise that or not. This is not just about IR matters between existing workers and their employers; it is about the lived experience that we heard around the table today and the consequences that arise when that is not taken into consideration. They are not here today but representatives of an organisation as hoity-toity as RTÉ who were on this group gave us evidence of the absolute poverty they experience on their pensions in the period when they cuts were brought in. I was quite shocked to hear how much people's living standards had been reduced and will remain reduced because they have no access to a forum in which they will be listened to. The Bill seeks to give them access and to give them a voice around the table and a process of being heard. Having to go to an ombudsman is not sufficient and often going as an individual rather than a collective totally weakens a person's position.

The OPLA went to great lengths to ensure that the proposals in the Bill were robust. We are open to amendments and we want to see it progress in the committee. I thank the Chair and the committee for their time.