Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We emerged from Government Buildings to be told there was new legislation to be brought in to be known as the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest Bill. We did not know it would be shortened to FEMPI and become shorthand and common currency within the public service and public lexicon. It was one of the greatest travesties perpetrated on public servants because it was called a pension levy by Fianna Fáil. It could not have been a pension levy because it was applied to the people I was representing at the time who were paid on an hourly rate as home helps. It could not have been a pension levy because it was applied to people who will never benefit from a public service pension scheme and yet they were expected to pay for the mistakes made by the Government at the time. Those people were the first ones in the firing line when Fianna Fáil decided to drive our economy off the edge of a cliff.

Those people could not understand it as ICTU had made an offer to the Government of a scheme that would have ensured similar, if not more or less the same, savings. It would have protected the rate and made it easier for those people to get it back. They did not know what the Government had in store for them. They were very hopeful that with a new Government in place and the Labour Party in Government something would be done for public servants and they would not be expected unfairly to shoulder further burdens. They were wrong. We would have negotiated and balloted but those public and civil servants knew the Government had within its arsenal legislation with the capacity to punish them. It was unfair to those public servants and it is a bit rich to have people who started it now suddenly finding some sympathy, although it is welcome.

We discussed this issue at our Ard-Fheis and recognised the role played by public servants. They are the people who turn up when a house is on fire and when someone has been the victim of a crime. They are the people who used to collect our bins and we all dearly wish they still did, and they are the men and women who work as porters. Those people have been unfairly and systematically targeted since the first FEMPI legislation was put on the Statute Book. Those people are the ones who have had to carry the can and are the ones who least deserve it.

It is unfortunately a fact that if FEMPI were scrapped in the morning, the biggest beneficiaries would be the civil and public servants earning over €100,000. I certainly did not put myself before the electorate to assist those people because they can do quite well for themselves. I am here to represent workers on low and middle incomes - the fellows who turn up when a house goes on fire or the porter who pushes people down to theatre - who look at this legislation and know it is still there hanging over their heads. It is unfair, and any unwinding of this legislation must prioritise the low to middle-income earners who were the first in the firing line and the first to be targeted by the people sitting to my left in the Chamber.

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