John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for his courtesy and constructiveness in dealing with the Bill. I am grateful that he and his officials have decided not to oppose it but to allow it proceed to the next Stage which we hope to do, relatively quickly, giving everyone the opportunity to table the substantial Committee Stage amendments which are required.

In answer to a few specific points, such as the wider applicability of the Bill, I agree absolutely, I think there should be a policy not only throughout the public sector but in the private sector. We have to purge ourselves of the thinking which states that we can tell right now at what age people in the future should retire, not knowing anything about their health or competence, their lucidity, the prevailing circumstances and context of the sector in which they work at the time it is not rational. The simplest way to do it is to get rid of the concept altogether. I cannot honestly think of an exception in the public sector where we should say that, purely on grounds of age, a person should have to retire.

The question of the dead wood was raised. Again, what is being said is that our inability to get rid of young dead wood - it appears as if we are studying foresters here - should not first compound the problem by not getting rid of old dead wood. The problem is that it is forcing us to get rid of perfectly good, viable wood that just happens to be a little bit older. It is an incredibly blunt instrument, if the only way we can get rid of the one in ten bad actors at the age of 65 is to get rid of all people at the age of 65. That, clearly, is an issue that needs to be addressed.

The issue of blocking younger people was mentioned by some of my colleagues, that if we do not have mandatory retirement it imposes an unnecessary obstacle to talented young people coming through. Trust me, at every stage of my career I have encouraged young people and have tried to get new jobs made for them. I have tried to get them hired and I have tried to build careers. I would like to think that I have a reasonable reputation as a mentor in this regard. There is no part of me that would want to block young people from coming in. If the logic of it is that we have to get rid of older people in order to make jobs for younger people, why not bring in retirement at 45 years of age. That would be great, we could give everybody a job at 25 or 30 years. To me, there is no logic to that. Let us think this issue through. The existence of 65-year-olds in jobs is not what blocks 30-year-olds from getting jobs, it is economic inefficiency that blocks 30-year-olds from working in an environment which is adequately resourced to make jobs for them.

The US does not have mandatory retirement. Its economy is doing quite nicely and coming out of a very long recession. The unemployment rates in America have reduced quite a bit and it did not have to do this by enforcing mandatory retirement. It understood that one has to get rid of all the inefficiency in the economy that one can. It is fundamentally inefficient to pay two people for the same job. If the level of efficiency is increased in the system, the system will perform better. It will be better for the micro-economy of that sector and, ultimately, for the macro-economy if that kind of reform takes place everywhere. My own sense is that is a bad argument. In addition, there is something incredibly not just inefficient - it is way past inefficient - subversive to the health of an economy to have large numbers of dependent people in the economy. That is not the way it should be. The more people who are productive as opposed to being dependent, the better the economy will be. This is one quick way of taking some little slice out of our increasingly unbalanced productive to dependent ratio.

The double consent process, to which the Minister referred, that it must be in the gift of the employer to allow the person to stay on, is wrong. Why should it be in the gift of employers to let somebody work at 65 and not in their gift to let them work at 45? If the Minister intends to introduce a new regime where people in the public service could be fired, I would be all in favour of that but I do not think it should apply specifically to people in the health service at the age of 65. The logic that people only work when it is good for the system and good for their line managers to think that they can continue working should apply at every age group and across every sector of the public service. It is not something that should be confined to 65-year-old physiotherapists, nurses or doctors.

There is a lesson and a quick fix here. We know that the reform was put in place between 2004 and 2012, that somebody at some stage said, with the new contracts, mandatory age-based retirement is wrong. Therefore, why do we not extend it to the people who were in posts in 2004? It seems to me that if the positions are in place to allow those folks to have their pension rights in some sense rationalised for those who are not going to retire, why not do it for the folks who are that big demographic bulge for the years before and are not, as yet, retired? As a short-term measure, that would greatly improve the situation in which we find ourselves in terms of the staffing crisis in the health service. It is not radical, there is a precedent, it was done from 2004 until it was rolled back when a decision was made, it must be acknowledged, to incentivise people to take early retirement by hitting their pension if they remained post the full retirement age, which in retrospect is poor public policy. I know of a number of very fine doctors, researchers and others who said they would have to leave a couple of years earlier, otherwise their pensions would be affected.

We have had a very constructive debate. Earlier, I was not sure if the Bill would be accepted on this Stage but at least it would get the debate going, which it has done, but it has been even more constructive. I am conscious of the limited lifespan of this Oireachtas. I am going to give the Bill a very high priority and seek as much help as I can from colleagues on both sides of the House to win whatever mechanisms we can so that we will not have some nebulous "see you next Wednesday approach" when it gets to Committee Stage but will have a firm date, probably next month, so that we can make some attempt to progress it through the Oireachtas prior to its dissolution.

I thank the Minister and his officials for attending.