Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

In my naïveté I used to think that public sector reform had something to do with improving the quality of public services. I have learnt definitively with this Government that it means nothing of the sort. This amendment seeks to slash the illness entitlement of public sector workers and amend a Bill that has already carved up the conditions of public sector workers. It comes on the back of a relentless and in many cases vitriolic assault on ordinary low and middle earning public sector workers who have become scapegoats for the economic crisis created by others. It is inevitably justified by the narrative of setting the private sector worker against the public sector worker. It is a completely bogus narrative although it is as predictable as the clock ticking that certain newspapers will wheel out articles assaulting public sector workers in their constant tirade attacking low and middle income workers. For the record, not that it will make any difference to the narrative that we hear here or read in the tabloid or rag media that passes for proper reporting, this distinction between public and private is utterly bogus. The real distinction is between low and middle income workers who, whether in the public or private sectors, have been slaughtered in the current recession, and those at the top of the public and private sectors who have been completely insulated and have continued to line their pockets, give themselves bonuses, pay themselves obscene salaries and are never subject to the caps or strictures put on the ordinary worker. Even when certain strictures are put in place they are flagrantly disregarded by the Government and the top executives in the health service or wherever the hell it might be in the banks.

It is clear that what reform really means is making ordinary workers work harder, longer and for less, and relentlessly battering them with cuts. The result is that public services deteriorate and are seriously degraded. The Government said that it had successfully redeployed 10,000 people, which sounds wonderful but we need to see an example of how this works. The centralisation of medical card services, the redeployment of people to the centre in Finglas, has been a disaster for people applying for medical cards. It has been the mechanism through which, as a matter of default in a bureaucratic box-ticking exercise, people are denied the right to their medical cards and cannot find a human being to talk to because there is no local office any more where one can speak to a human being and state one's case. That is so-called public sector reform and is nothing other than a systematic degrading of our public services and of those who work in them. The Government deems it entirely appropriate and logical to take the sick and illness entitlement from public sector workers while demoralising them and causing them more stress and almost certainly making them more ill more frequently. What else would the Government do when that is the direction of policy?

The highest level of absenteeism is in the health service. Is there any wonder about that when the Government has taken 10,000 health workers and €3 billion out of the system and workers are absolutely traumatised by what they must deal with, an impossible situation that they face when they go to work day in, day out? Is it any wonder that they get sick more often? Other workers have been mentioned, such as gardaí and firemen. What about community welfare officers who have to deal with desperate people coming in day after day begging them for money that the Government does not give them? The list goes on. The Government is slashing their entitlements and disgracefully, it is doing it retrospectively. Is it not absolutely amazing that we cannot retrospectively vary the pensions of previous Taoisigh, Ministers and all the rest with their massive pensions? We can do nothing about the disgrace that is going on with executives in the Central Remedial Clinic because they had contracts but we can retrospectively vary the sick leave entitlements of ordinary workers and be damned to their constitutional or legal rights. Those are the disgraceful double standards that operate in this country.

The distinction is made between critical and non-critical illness. How exactly is critical illness going to be defined in these arbitrary powers now being given to the Minister to lay down the specifics of the new regulations for sick leave entitlements and so on? Will cancer treatments, which could be strung out over six or nine months, or a year, be defined as critical? I certainly hope they will but I strongly fear they will not. What about mental health issues? This is a major problem but there is an attitude among certain people on the Government benches that mental or stress-related illness is not real illness.

The attitude is that we just need to put measures in place that will force people to go to work even when they are not fit to do so, and even though their unfitness to do so is often related to what this Government has done to their working conditions, pay and so on. If we were interested in actually taking a reform measure that might improve the stress that is put on ordinary workers at the front line of our public services, why do we not bring in a regulation giving people a voluntary opportunity to work near where they live, so they do not have to travel long distances across the city in congested traffic? Would that not boost their morale a little and improve the situation of absenteeism, make services more local and so on? That is a rational approach to public sector reform. Of course, this has nothing to do with public reform. It is just another assault, this time on workers who are sick and often on those who were made sick by the activities of this Government in raining down relentless cuts on their pay, conditions and resources.

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