Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy’s speech back in 2016 meant, and People Before Profit’s position was, that the financial emergency measures in the public interest, FEMPI, should be repealed in their entirety. If FEMPI was repealed in its entirety, it would have meant that with regard to the pension reversals to which Deputies Boyd Barrett and Paul Murphy referred, those people would have got their higher pensions and would have had their cuts reversed back in 2016, not in 2021. Legally, the Minister had no choice. In 2017, this House passed legislation to say that the latest date that a Minister could delay for this last cohort, whose pensions and pay was cut as a result of FEMPI, was the end of this month. That is the law passed by this Parliament. The Deputy seems to think that the Minister, Deputy Michael McGrath, should just break the law. That is what the Deputy is saying: that the Minister must ignore the law passed by this House in 2017, which the Deputies were all involved in at the time.

See this speech in context