Noel Grealish (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am grateful for the opportunity to support this Bill which seeks to address an issue that potentially affects a large proportion of our population, especially those of a particular age. When people retire, particularly from large organisations in which there are many hundreds of employees, they can effectively become ghosts overnight. As long as they are still working, they have a voice, their grievances can be heard and they have avenues to challenge decisions that affect them, but once they retire they lose that voice. Decisions that can greatly impact on the quality of their lives can be made without any consultation with them. If they feel they have been wronged, they no longer have a platform to air that grievance and no opportunity to challenge those decisions. This must create a feeling of frustration and helplessness for people who may already be struggling with a different kind of life away from the workplace.

People on pensions also need security and to know that their income, which is much reduced from what they were taking home when working, will not be cut overnight, leaving them in financial difficulty with no means of making up that gap. In the past, I met the retired employees of the ESB in Galway whose pensions have been frozen for a dozen years, a decision in respect of which they were given no say when it was being made, and they still have no say in having that decision reversed. One of the men I met contacted me again recently and told me that he had paid pension contributions for the 43 years he had worked with the company and that his pension is now less than what it was 12 years ago when he retired. There are many others in similar situations, and in other organisations too. For example, last year hundreds of employees of Aer Lingus and the Dublin Airport Authority, lost a High Court challenge to cuts to their pensions. These are people who worked all of their lives and these decisions were taken without any reference to them. These decisions directly affect their standard of living. In the future, they must be given a voice in regard to changes to their pension conditions, in the same way as those who are still working have to be consulted in regard to proposed changes to their pay and conditions.

Last December, the Cabinet reversed pension cuts to retired Taoisigh, Ministers and senior civil servants who were in office during the financial crisis a decade ago. There is little chance of that happening for the retirees of the companies to which I referred. It is important that, into the future, people who retire have a say when it comes to decisions on reductions in their pensions. This Bill sets out to right a wrong that has existed for far too long and it has my support.

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