Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is important to put on the record that there are more than 2,000 section 39 organisations throughout the State. They provide important disability services. They include many, but not all, of our hospices and provide vital services for our elderly people. A differential in pay has now opened up between staff working for HSE bodies and staff working for these section 39 bodies. That is causing an issue for recruitment in some places. Section 39 bodies are NGOs, charities and companies. They are not part of the public service and therefore the people who work for them are not Government employees or public servants, nor have they ever been. The Deputy will know from having read the Labour Court recommendation that the recommendation falls on the legal employers, which is not the HSE or the State. These bodies are part-funded by means of a block grant. They also raise money in other ways. They range from organisations that get as little as €10,000 from the Government to ones that get millions to provide important services. Some comply with public sector pay rules and some, as we know, have not in the past. That has been a real problem. Some reduced pay in line with pay in the public service and some did not. Almost all had their block grants reduced and almost all have had their block grants increased in recent years. In some cases, they have passed that on to staff in the form of pay restoration and in other cases they have not.

We are dealing with a diverse picture and it seems to me that staff working in these organisations have, in some ways, been caught in the middle, between their employers, the section 39 organisations themselves, the HSE and the Government. While we have been examining this for some weeks now, we still do not know how many people are affected and we do not know what the cost would be to resolve the situation. We have not been able to ascertain that. We want to establish a process whereby we can look at each of these organisations and their staff individually, find out how many people are affected, what it would cost to resolve it and whether, in some cases, block grants were increased but a decision was taken by those organisations not to pass on some of that to their staff in pay restoration in the way section 38 organisations had to.

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