Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left) | Oireachtas source

The amendments in the group are trying to achieve the same thing. The Government has made much of priding itself on being at the forefront of overhauling the State's industrial relations machinery. We tried to raise the issue during the discussions on the Workplace Relations Act, which was supposed to be the most significant overhaul of the system in 50 years and was supposed to deliver a world class workplace relations environment. While some improvements were made, it has left a substantial group of workers, albeit retired ones, out of the process.

If we do not rectify the matter in this legislation, it is clear from the previous amendment the Minister of State moved that it will not be rectified. It is urgent that this be done. The reason this is necessary now but was not when the original industrial relations machinery was set up is that, traditionally, the income and livelihood of a retired worker, who had a pension and was in receipt of it, was ring-fenced and could not be touched. If there were difficulties in a pension scheme, they were dealt with by the people who were paying into the scheme, not the people who had already retired. That was the justification for their not having a voice. Everything about that changed with the introduction of recent legislation, voted through and agreed by this Government, which allowed trustees to put their hands in the pockets of existing retired workers, and those decisions are being taken over the heads of retired workers. That is appalling. The answers we are getting to these issues from Minister's replies to parliamentary questions are not good enough.

The Irish aviation superannuation scheme has been the focus of considerable attention. The scheme has 15,000 members, which equates to the population of a small or even a medium-sized town, and when we add in their families, we are talking about a huge body of people whose livelihoods have been affected. Those people paid into a pension scheme all their working lives and they had a reasonable expectation that their retirement pensions would be ring-fenced. It is particularly galling for those people, some of whom worked in the State's national airline, that their colleagues who worked in the United States or in Britain are getting the full benefits of their pensions but those who worked in Ireland are seeing their retirement income decimated without their having any say in the matter. It is scandalous. When I raised this matter last week with the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport I got the following answer:

An agreed solution was implemented at the start of the year to address the funding difficulties in the [IASS] scheme. This agreed solution is a matter for the trustee, the companies participating in the scheme, the scheme members and the Pensions Authority.

However, it was not a matter for the scheme members, because the retired members were excluded from that process and did not have a voice in any of the discussions on compensation or mitigatory factors. Unless we provide for this now, how will people have a voice? It is scandalous. I would love to hear the Minister of State's justification for not doing this. What other scenario would we have in which existing, retired and deferred members - people against whose livelihoods decisions can be made - were not given a voice? This is extremely urgent. It is safe to say that if it is not addressed here, it will not be addressed anywhere else. Apart from the airport pensioners, there are many others in different defined benefit schemes. The idea that the Government can shrug its shoulders and say, "It is not us; it was the trustees who made those decisions, and we are very sorry for their troubles," is not washing with people because the deferred and retired members know that the reason the trustees have been empowered to take money from retired and deferred pensioners is that the Government changed the law to allow them to do so. That is where the blame will lie. A small rectification of that is required to give those people at least a voice in that process, so that they can have an input before such decisions are made.

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