Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

One of the attractions previously of serving in the Garda or the Army was that when a person went out on pension, he or she could get a new job and have the pension. My understanding is that that was changed in the past ten years to a situation where, if a person who leaves with a pension takes up public service employment and does the same full amount of work as his or her colleagues, equal pay for equal work does not apply because there is an abatement of the pension. However, if that person moves into the private sector, he or she can keep the pension and get the private sector wages but the skills are lost to the public sector. Has any assessment been done on that issue to find out the extent to which it has reduced the incentive and the attractiveness of serving in the Defence Forces until the Defence Forces pension age and then being able to move on and take up employment in the public or private sector without penalty?

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