Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

I am not quoting him. I am paraphrasing and saying that was the gist of what he said. We have gone through large sections of this legislation and we spent eight hours on Committee Stage. In that time I was surprised by the Minister's attitude in just a couple of instances. This was one of them. In general, he was fair and reasonable and we could agree to disagree on issues, but when it came to this issue, I was surprised by his attitude. He shocked us. I advise all of the people working in the organisations to which I have referred to read the debate and judge this for themselves. I am not quoting him, but over the eight hours of debate I was surprised by his attitude in this regard. His view was that these people have a very good pension scheme, they can retire after 30 years and they are doing very well, but now they are coming in and looking for some enhancement of the new scheme.

The representatives of these organisations have always been clear in the understanding when the scheme was being explained to them, that they would be no worse off than any other similar grade in respect of the position with regard to final pensions. They all know they will be a bit worse off. One would want to be blind and deaf not to understand that. However, they do not want to be any more worse off than others of a similar grade.

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