Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As far as I am concerned, the Minister of State is giving an inaccurate reflection of the meeting’s content. The retired workers he met were representing 500,000 pensioners who used to work in the Civil Service and the wider public sector and who built up this State.

It has happened in the past that changes to their pension pot have been negotiated for the benefit of employers and unions. The trade union movement is not objecting to this Bill passing the various stages. The Bill is imminently sensible and belongs in the Minister of State's Department. It involves amendments to the Industrial Relations Acts and not to social protection legislation so there is absolutely no coherent reason for it to be passed to the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, for her to deal with. When the Bill passed Second Stage here, the Minister of State's Government amended the motion to say it would be deemed to be read a second time within a year, which would have brought us to June 2022. It is now October 2023. People get older and their pension pots decrease and all the while a simple amendment is needed to a provision that now gives them the right to go to the Workplace Relations Commission within six months of retirement. All this Bill does is extend that provision to cover any period in which their pension is interfered with. It gives them a voice and a say in what goes on without having to put up pickets, demand an end to this, that or the other or to take part in other industrial action. It gives them a voice.

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