Frances Fitzgerald (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister of State at the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs with responsibility for drugs strategy and community affairs, Deputy Pat Carey, and thank him for taking this Adjournment matter regarding the need to outline the reason the benchmarking pay award has not been paid to some staff who work for local drugs task forces.

It has been brought to my attention that employees of the Clondalkin drugs task force, which is in my constituency, received a Labour Court decision in 2005 that, for the purposes of pay, they should be aligned to HSE grades and for that reason should be eligible for benchmarking payments. Subsequent meetings held between the Department of Finance and IMPACT on behalf of the employees resulted in an agreement by the Department that the payments should be awarded to the staff members. However, the HSE, as one of the main funding sources for drugs task forces, has proved unwilling to seriously engage in terms of facilitating the award. The resulting uncertainty among groups which are trying to address the issue of drugs can be imagined. It means that people who do valuable work in the community are leaving certain projects for other employment and it is a complete disincentive for recruitment. Unease has arisen because colleagues are being paid different rates for effectively doing the same job and a number of people are on lesser salaries than more recently recruited staff. These anomalies are creating uncertainty and unhappiness for staff of the drugs task forces.

I attended a meeting at which people working on a variety of projects came together to consider their next steps. I hope the Minister of State will be in a position to inform the House whether he hopes progress can be made. If the Labour Court ruled that the payment should be made and if the Department of Finance, unusually, concurred with that view, there is no reason for a State body such as the HSE to stand in the way. I urge the Minister of State to intervene with the HSE to facilitate the payment of the award to the relevant employees.