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

It seems to me that Schedule 3 excludes the commercial semi-State bodies from everything we are talking about here today. I thought that part of the reason for these redeployment, recruitment and appointment moves is to open the possibility of staff moving between these bodies and the rest of the public service. Perhaps that is not the case. If it is the case, we should be including them in this measure. I am proposing that all of these semi-State bodies should be included in this legislation. There is a case to be made to include companies like Bord na gCon, EirGrid, Horse Racing Ireland, the National Stud Company, the Railway Procurement Agency and the VHI - I will not go through them all - in this sick pay legislation.

I would like to ask the Minister a question in this context. Perhaps he will not be able to answer it. There are different rates of sick pay.

Will they continue with the six months and six months? We will probably find that some of the commercial semi-State organisations are operating the three months and the three months. The problem is that we just do not know what they have. We had this before when pay cuts were introduced under the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest Acts. We all know of people who might work in the Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine, the local authority or the HSE, and the guy next door might work in CIE or Bord na Móna. They all generally regard themselves as public service workers in a similar category. However, when it came to some matters under the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest Acts they were in different categories. We are again going down the road of changing the pay for 290,000 public servants - I do not know how many are involved in the commercial semi-State organisations. It is important to establish what the sick-pay arrangements are in each of these commercial semi-State organisations and other such bodies.

I believe they should be included under the scope of this legislation because the same general sick-pay principles we have been discussing in the past few hours should apply as equally as possible across all of these. There may be specific cases such as teachers who might come in in September or members of the Defence Forces who might have a slightly different regulation. However, it would be better for everybody concerned to have similar arrangements. There is no point in us doing all that and some of these commercial semi-State companies, such as the ESB and An Post, having a much more generous level of sick leave. They need to be considered in the same context as the other areas the Minister mentioned, such as the Civil Service, defence, education, health, local government and justice.

Regardless of whether the semi-State bodies are included in the scheme, Irish Water should be on the list given that it has been established and is operational. It is even more bizarre now than it was when I tabled the amendment because I now understand that Irish Water will have its service level agreements with the local authorities for the next few years to be reviewed subsequently and then they can run on until 2025. Essentially the delivery of water services will be run by a semi-State body that collects levies, but the work on the ground will be done by local authority workers with a service level agreement. It is incongruous to have different sick-pay arrangements between people who are essentially working for the same organisation. The local authority workers who will be working on the pipes will have one arrangement, whereas the people in the Irish Water head office may have an entirely different sick-pay and sick-leave arrangement, and not the three months and three months we are introducing now. Irish Water is either one project or it is not; the purpose was to centralise it. It would be bizarre if we ended up with local authority workers doing work for Irish Water coming under the local authority sick-pay scheme, whereas those working for a commercial-State organisation would not be included in the same scheme. I do not even know what that scheme is. I am essentially looking for consistency across the board.

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