Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As was mentioned and as the whole country knows, teachers and gardaí have felt forced to embark on a significant campaign of industrial action over the next few weeks in pursuit of fairness in respect of pay. There will also be mass meetings of nurses over the coming couple of weeks to discuss pay issues. One of the several things at the heart of this looming industrial action is the anger and frustration felt by teachers, gardaí and, increasingly, by nurses over the issue of equality of pay. The call was clearly articulated last Thursday by the ASTI, in a demonstration in which I participated outside the gates of this House, when young and older teachers stood together demanding equal pay for equal work. It is a basic and simple principle.

I was struck by the sight of newly qualified and new entrant teachers explaining how angry and frustrated they were after coming out of college, getting their qualifications, in some cases at very high levels, and getting paid €6,000, €7,000 or €8,000 less than a teacher with the same qualifications working in the same school just because they had entered service after 2011. Will the Taoiseach accept that such inequality in pay is unacceptable and that it breaches the most fundamental principle of treating people equally?

In the 1970s, we got equal pay for women, which did not exist previously, and nobody would dare to suggest we should have anything less than equal pay for men and women. We have equality legislation which outlaws discrimination against people on pretty much any basis. Is it not in line with the fundamental principle of equality that teachers, nurses and gardaí should get the same pay for doing the same work? Will the Taoiseach commit to re-establishing that equality and ending the pay apartheid which is one of the burning issues angering teachers, nurses and gardaí and which is forcing many young people who might go into those professions to leave this country because the Taoiseach continues to allow that discrimination against them?

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