Dáil debates

Tuesday, 5 December 2017

Public Service Pay and Pensions Bill 2017: Committee Stage

 

7:15 pm

Photo of Mick BarryMick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I support Deputy Seamus Healy's amendment, the effect of which would be the complete repeal of the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest Act 2013. It is hard to believe the legislation underpinning the declaration of a financial emergency is still in place in 2017. In less than a month we will be in 2018, but the first reports that the recession was bottoming out and that a recovery was under way in the economy were in 2014.

Members can go back and look at the newspaper reports. We have had 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 and we will soon be in 2018, yet the Government still insists on keeping this emergency legislation in place. These are emergency measures to hold down the pay, pensions and rights of public servants at time when the landlords are creaming it and the multinational corporations and business generally are raking in record profits. To have emergency measures for public servants shows where the priority of this Government lies.

This legislation is being used as a big stick to beat young public servants and to enforce a denial of equal pay for equal work. We have had cuts to the starting salaries of those employed in the public sector since 2011 and the new pay agreement, the public services stability agreement, or PSSA, which the Minister hails as being a step towards ending two-tier pay, in reality copper-fastens it. Under this agreement, no change can occur in the essential character of the two-tier system during the duration of the agreement up to 2021 because the pay rates cannot be equalised within that period. This is outrageous. The idea that we would pay people less on the basis of the colour of skin, gender or sexual orientation would be outrageous yet how is it fundamentally different to discriminate against people on the basis of their age? While the Government will say it is not related to age but to new entrants, the overwhelming majority of those new entrants are young people. It is right and proper that the three teacher unions are opposed and I support them entirely in opposing that measure.

Is it not a scandal that those young workers continue to be discriminated against and continue to be paid lower pay for work of equal value, while this agreement will allow people who drove this country over the cliff in the interests of the builders, the developers and the bankers - people like Brian Cowen and Bertie Ahern - to have their pensions fully restored? It is one law for the likes of Brian Cowen and Bertie Ahern and something different entirely for young teachers and other young workers in the public sector. If those young workers, along with their fellow trade unionists, vote democratically to refuse to sign up to the new agreement, FEMPI kicks in and backs up the Government in saying that rather than recognising the right to free collective bargaining, it will enforce extra penalties on their head, increments will be frozen until 2021 and they will have an effective two years-plus continuation of the pension levy. This is anti-union and anti-worker legislation. It should not be tweaked or tampered with; it should be thrown out entirely. I completely support Deputy Healy's amendment.

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