Anne Ferris (Wicklow, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Yes. These Friday sittings are very good.

The purpose of this Bill is to amend the Employment Equality Act 1998 to abolish mandatory retirement ages for people who are able and willing to continue in the role for which they were employed. The Bill provides exceptions for security-related areas such as An Garda Síochána. This is not a new idea. The legislation before the House today is based on similar legislation elsewhere, including in the US, where compulsory retirement ages have been outlawed for quite some time, and in the UK, where such age discrimination was banned in 2011.

Section 1 of the Bill provides a mechanism whereby an employer can provide a financial incentive to an employee to retire voluntarily, but the overall emphasis in this legislation is on the voluntary nature of a decision to retire. The Bill aims to change the position that arises in many workplaces across the country, and particularly in State roles, whereby people attaining a certain fixed age - be it 60 or 65 - are compelled to retire, often against their will. This Bill will also address the growing anomaly whereby people retiring at 65 may have to wait a year or longer to access State pensions. The idea of signing on for the jobseeker's allowance after working for nearly half a century is abhorrent to many employees and is, frankly, an unacceptable request by the State.

To most reasonable people, it sounds like basic common sense to allow a highly skilled 65-year-old to continue in employment. I would not like to be the person who had to ask President Michael D. Higgins, the Queen of England or the Pope to cease their working lives because it has suddenly been noticed that they are well beyond 65. Over the years, many experienced politicians have been elected to the Houses of the Oireachtas and other parliaments worldwide at ages well over 65.

The newly elected leader of the Labour Party in Britain is starting his new job at the age of 66. Last month, TheDaily Telegraph published an article entitled, "It is Jeremy Corbyn's age that makes him seem fresh". It offered the considered opinion that it is hard for an ageing society to respect younger leaders which, according to the newspaper, "all seem to come from the same shiny factory". We are an ageing society but we are ageing well, and I say that modestly.

Thanks to improved nutrition and advances in medical science, we are living longer. How often do we hear that 50 is the new 40 or 60 is the new 50? Today's celebrity role models are often women and men aged over 65 but as youthful in outlook as someone decades younger. The generations are blurring. In many respects, there is no longer a generation gap or not a discernible one anyway. The recent marriage equality referendum demonstrated a shared open-mindedness across several generations, but it is disappointing that this wider movement towards a more age respectful society does not seem to have embedded itself in the culture of employment, particularly in the State sector.

When I launched the Bill in April 2014, I quickly discovered the popularity of removing upper age limits from employment contracts. I was inundated with e-mails and letters from members of the public praising the Bill but also sharing with me their own stories of age discrimination. The number of people who have suffered both emotionally and financially through being forced out of their jobs prematurely is shocking. In the past week alone, I have dealt with two cases involving HSE employees approaching the age of 65. It will come as no surprise to anybody familiar with the public sector that these workers are highly trained, having benefited from many years of continual postgraduate learning connected to their roles, I presume at great public expense. One of them occupies a key administrative role while the other is a trained medical professional. Both are youthful and energetic 64 year olds. These two women know more about their roles than any younger person who will replace them. The overall cost of replacing such key staff is outweighed by the hidden cost associated with plugging the skills and gap in the vacuum left by them, but people should try telling this to the HSE.

I was expecting to welcome Dr. Albert Mariani, an eminent consultant neurologist from the US to the public Gallery. He is visiting Ireland with his wife, Dr. Aurora Mariani. The debate would seem like something from the Middle Ages to them if they were here given under no circumstances would fit and able health professionals be forced into retirement against their will in the US. Mandatory retirement was outlawed there in 1967. With respect, that was more than a decade before the Minister of State with responsibility for equality was born. What is becoming apparent is that while politicians are predominantly in favour of removing this form of age discrimination from the workplace, there are often layers of resistance within larger organisations, possibly because young employees are frustrated by their lack of career progression. However, two wrongs do not make a right. It is possible in a properly managed organisation to have progressive career paths for staff of all ages. We do not have to be fearful of older employees. In a public sector that has lost a disproportionately high percentage of experienced employees due to voluntary early retirement, we cannot afford to push out the remaining experienced employees against their will. It is not a big leap to make a connection between the diminishing numbers of people aged over 50 in the public sector and the increasing number of costly errors identified by the Comptroller and Auditor General and the Committee of Public Accounts. We need more young people to help run our public services, but we also need older, experienced people to mentor them. Otherwise there will be repeated reinventions of the wheel and mistakes that never become lessons.

Let us imagine the outrage in the Chamber if an employer advertised a job with a higher salary for men than for women and, furthermore, if that employer set as a job condition that the woman would be required to give up her post in the event of marriage. Such employment conditions seem unthinkable now but they were commonplace until the 1970s. Until then, it was perfectly legal to issue an employment contract that discriminated against gender. For much of that time, it was unusual not to discriminate on the ground of gender. Women were worth less in the workplace and married women were worth nothing to State employers. The ban on married women in the Civil Service was introduced in 1932 as part of an international trend to protect male employment. In 1934, the marriage bar rule was extended to primary schoolteachers, a profession that had included high numbers of married women for approximately 100 years prior to the ban. As if this was not enough discrimination against women in the workplace, the Conditions of Employment Act 1936 introduced by the Minister for Industry and Commerce, Seán Lemass, gave the State strong powers to limit the number of women working in industry. One could not make it up. Sadly, even though most other countries had dropped their marriage bar by the 1950s, Ireland cruised past the gender debates of the 1960s and into the 1970s before this Parliament finally removed the ban on women working in the public service. It was around that time that the legislative bar on women serving on juries was also removed.

The simple fact is Ireland's accession to the European Community brought with it obligations to treat women equally. The first equality Bill following EU membership was the Anti-Discrimination (Pay) Act 1974, which took two years to pass because employers strongly resisted the idea of women being paid the same as men for the same role. Finally, more than 40 years after the introduction of the marriage bar, it was abolished by legislation passed by the House in 1977, but not without years of debate about the effect on male workers of granting equality rights to females. History professor, Diarmaid Ferriter, one of the many experts who has commented over the years on the destructive effect on our society and economy of the marriage bar, has illustrated the point well by comparing the 5% of married women in employment in 1966 with the 50% employed in 2006. There are still barriers to women re-entering the workplace following time out to care for their families. We do not need to compound that by imposing limits on the duration of the working life of an employee, but, sadly, we do not seem to be learning from past mistakes. Perhaps, if a few more people from the marriage bar days were still working in the HSE and other State bodies, there might be a clearer understanding of the value to public service delivery of retaining experienced personnel.

I was shocked yesterday, given this Bill has been in the Oireachtas system for more than a year, to receive an unfavourable critique of it from the Department of Justice and Equality. Following my dealings with the HSE in recent times on the same subject, I should not have been surprised. I know by now that within every large organisational structure there are people waiting to progress through the mandatory retirement of colleagues. I expect that scenario also applies to a handful of people at senior level in the Department, but there are enough of them to cause significant resistance and ensure significant time barriers to the progression of the legislation. I am being told now more than 18 months after it was initiated that the measures may be legally flawed or even unconstitutional and that they might provide a barrier to the mobile younger people in the workforce. Independent analysis of the Department in the context of issues relating to An Garda Síochána identified cracks in the organisational structure. However, the path to improving any employment structure should not include the step of age cleansing. To remove any doubt about the legality of what is being processed, the Bill was drafted with the benefit of legal advice from one of Ireland's leading lawyers. The question of unconstitutionality does not arise and I am somewhat amused that the Government is supporting the legislation against the advice of departmental officials who claim elements of it may be unconstitutional.

The last time I was in a situation like this, I lost the whip because my Government colleagues felt compelled not to pass Second Stage of legislation that might be unconstitutional. I suppose I can take comfort from the fact that the obstacles to the Bill will not come from politicians, except in one respect. Should the Taoiseach call an early election and dissolve the Dáil in the coming weeks, this legislation will not see the light of day. As with all much-awaited legislation not yet enacted, an early election will banish to the dustbin of history this proposal to give employment rights to over-65s. Tens of thousands of adoptees would also be disappointed by an early election as their long-awaited tracing and contact legislation would not be enacted during the lifetime of the Government.

It might be easier for all of us to get re-elected before the winter sets in but we really do not have that entitlement. The citizens elected us to do a job and we should finish that job. I want to see this Bill enacted during the remaining life of this Government. It is quite clear we may not get the opportunity again for some time to rectify the serious wrong visited on people approaching retirement. It seems unlikely from yesterday's correspondence that at least some of the officials in the Department would be rushing to draft replacement legislation of this type for a future Minister.

I thank the many well-wishers who have contacted me in support of this Bill, including Labour Party colleagues. History tells us that fears about equality are never justified and I hope I will get a favourable response from the Minister of State.

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