Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am taking this debate under protest because the line Minister should be here.

On 22 July 2008, the Labour Court ruled that an agreed pension scheme should be introduced for community employment supervisors and that the scheme should be funded by FÁS. It also ruled that this should be done without delay. Ten years have passed and the scheme has not been put in place. On 22 September 2009, the then line Department, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, sought clarity on a number of issues to enable FÁS to proceed with the pension scheme. A further six months elapsed and on 24 May 2010, the Department sought yet more time. Another four months elapsed and on 22 September 2010, FÁS announced it could no longer deal with the issue as responsibility for community employment schemes was moving to the Department of Social Protection. This meant the community employment supervisors and their representatives had to negotiate with that Department.

A number of further meetings took place but another nine months slipped by until 21 June 2011 when the Department sought a meeting with the representatives of the community employment supervisors, not to announce the details of their pensions but to inform them that it was seeking more time. The Department was given more time and four months later, in October 2011, it indicated it had finally decided it would not proceed to implement the Labour Court recommendation after all. It advanced two reasons for the decision, the first of which was that FÁS was not represented at or party to the Labour Court proceedings.

The Minister, her officials and everyone in the country knows there is no substance to that argument. FÁS was represented at the Labour Court hearing and I can name the two representatives of the organisation who attended if anyone wishes. They made submissions and the input of FÁS was referenced in the Labour Court decision. It is shameful, therefore, to try to get out of the matter by arguing that FÁS was not a party to the proceedings. In any case, even if FÁS had not been represented, in previous instances where matters related to community employment went to the Labour Court it was always the position, and always understood to be the position, that even though the supervisors were recognised as not being employees of FÁS, it nonetheless fell to FÁS to implement the decision of the Labour Court and fund its implementation.

As I stated, this is a rather threadbare excuse. However, not content with putting forward an excuse for inaction that had about as much credibility as Oscar Pistorius's defence, the Department decided to supplement its first excuse with a second one with even less credibility, namely, that the companies employing the supervisors did not provide pension schemes for them. In other words, community associations, GAA, handball and soccer clubs and so forth had not set up pension schemes for community employment supervisors. It may have escaped the Government's attention that the community employment aspect of the work of these clubs was funded by the State and it was illegal for any of these clubs or so-called employers to use this funding to set up a pension scheme as it was specifically allocated for salaries and some minor ancillary matters. The Government's excuse then is that because the employers of community employment supervisors did not act illegally, it cannot implement the Labour Court recommendation. If the first excuse was threadbare, the second was, frankly, mendacious.

The matter rested for four years until, in 2015, the Government facilitated the matter being further discussed under the ambit of the Lansdowne Road agreement. It accepted in principle that community employment supervisors should be entitled to a pension and established what was grandiloquently described as a high-level forum to discuss and settle the matter. The forum was set up three years ago and to date nothing has been settled. I note that in the past three years it has held a grand total of five meetings. Its members must be very high-level and busy.

In October 2017, two years after the establishment of the forum, the Minister for Finance committed the Government to the creation of a scoping system to work out the cost of all this. While the cost regarding community employment supervisors is very small, the argument was put forward that it could have knock-on effects throughout the community and voluntary sector. I do not understand that argument. There is nothing in it. All the organisations operating in the community and voluntary sector are unique, separate and distinct. This is simply about community employment supervisors, not anything else. The Government, however, seems to be saying that accepting a Labour Court recommendation to establish a pension scheme for community welfare supervisors would give rise to a whole lot of ancillary or knock-on claims throughout the voluntary and community sector. There is no reality to that. I note, however, that the Government relies heavily on the argument in its amendment to the motion. I assure the House that the motion is about community employment supervisors who, incidentally, have a Labour Court recommendation in their favour. I recall that last year when there was danger of industrial action from gardaí, the Government clung like a drowning man to a Labour Court recommendation which favoured the claim made by An Garda Síochána. The argument was that because the Labour Court was an organ of government, the Government could not go against its decision. It is refusing to implement this particular decision, however.

The motion before the House, which I urge the Minister of State, Deputy D'Arcy, to accept by withdrawing his ridiculous amendment, simply calls on the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform to meet immediately with unions representing community employment supervisors and assistant supervisors to permit negotiations to commence with a view to creating a process to bring this issue to finality. Given that these people have made a significant contribution to the country and been led by the nose for ten years in the expectation that they would get a pension and that the Labour Court recommendation would be honoured, it is not much to ask. I ask the House to support the motion if the Government refuses to withdraw its amendment.

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