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

I raise this issue to highlight the plight of 1,200 workers formerly employed by Irish Life, which was sold to a Canadian company, Great-West Lifeco, GWL. The net effect of what is proposed is that, on 30 June, the defined benefit scheme will be changed to a defined contribution scheme. This means that there will be an immediate loss of more than one third of the pensions the people involved were entitled to expect. The transfer from a defined benefit scheme to a defined contribution model also means that the risk attaching to the pension will be transferred from the company to the employees and that the latter may well lose more than 35% depending on the vagaries of the market.

None of the employees wants this. There has already been some industrial action and there is further industrial action threatened, even though these people are not the type of workers who usually engage in such action. We have long lamented the fact that wealthy, solvent companies are entitled to walk away from defined benefit schemes despite the fact that their employees have paid into those schemes year in, year out. Some of the 1,200 workers to whom I refer have been paying into the scheme for a lifetime.

When we talk about such situations, we normally refer to a solvent company walking away from a pension scheme in which the liabilities exceed the assets. In this case, not only is the company hugely profitable - so profitable, in fact, that it is in a position to transfer more than €200 million per year to its Canadian shareholders - the pension scheme is eminently healthy. I am informed that the scheme is €240 million in surplus. It seems perverse that a company of such magnitude and profitability can penalise its Irish workers in order to increase the dividend to its wealthy shareholders in Canada. In 2017, we put forward legislation which would prevent that sort of thing from happening. At the time, the then Minister for Social Protection and current Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, told me various things here on the floor of the House. He more or less told me that the sky would fall in if we attempted to take such action, all the while blithely ignoring the fact that other jurisdictions - not least our nearest neighbour, the United Kingdom - have in place the sort of protection to which I refer. The Bill in question subsequently passed Second Stage. Of course, it has since disappeared into the Bermuda triangle with thousands of other Bills that were put forward here in good faith.

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