Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

There is an inordinate number of temporary contract workers in the public sector, in particular, as a consequence of the recruitment embargo and people were brought in on very short-term contracts.

These contracts were renewed one after the other and many had to resort to the courts to have the State implement the law to give them fixity of tenure. If we look at the Department of Education and Skills, we will see the matter involves 935 primary school teachers and 2,618 post-primary school teachers, not all of whom are replacing teachers on maternity leave and so on. Almost 200 staff have been employed on temporary contracts in PeoplePoint; some of whom have been in the Department for years; were promised a confined establishment competition in which they could hope to move to a permanent position and now find themselves thrown into the mix with 29,000 other applicants to join the public sector generally. This is highly unfair. They were made a promise and I would like to know what the Minister will do about it.

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