Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

To repeat what I said in my reply, the public service pay agreement has embraced this issue and it has put in place a process which has not been left for 12 months, as was provided for in the agreement, because the process has already started on 12 October 2017. This issue is being taken seriously. It is worth reflecting on how this came about. Back in the midst of the crisis, there was an agreement to continue recruiting teachers at a time when the State was under huge financial pressure. The deal that then emerged was to recruit at lower pay. As the Deputy rightly said, that has given rise to anomalies. Many teachers were recruited in those difficult years who are on those lower scales but we have used the flexibility of the agreement to negotiate substantial improvements for them and a process is now in place. When it came to the recent agreements, where some €900 million was on the table to be negotiated as a settlement with the public service unions, the negotiations resulted in an agreement that did not address this particular way immediately but, instead, put this process together. That was openly negotiated between the two parties. I appreciate the teacher unions are not happy with the outcome but we have a process in place and I hope the unions will engage actively with it because in time, it hopefully will make progress.

See this speech in context