Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minster of State. I raise the issue of Newport day care centre in County Tipperary. The centre was established in 1992 and now caters for hundreds of elderly folk from the parishes of Newport, Toor, Birdhill, Ballinahinch, Killoscully, Ballina, my own village of Castleconnell, Kilcommon and Rearcross each week in a manner that has changed the quality of life for many of them for the better. A small team of ten health care professionals provide a wide range of community, health, well-being and respite services. Without this facility, hundreds of service users would have to attend at the already vastly overcrowded University Hospital Limerick for their health care needs. The staff have an extremely heavy workload and, like so many others in the sector, regularly go above and beyond their job specifications to ensure that the highest standards of care and support for their clients. Above all, there is a great sense of community that runs through the heart of everything that is done at the centre. The range of community and health services provided make a crucial difference to the lives of so many people in the Tipperary and Limerick region.

The staff who provide this excellent range of services had their pay cut without negotiation in 2008. A decade on, their pay remains exactly where it was after that cut. They see their colleagues and other HSE-funded organisations that have benefited from pay restoration or other section 39 organisations that now, thankfully, have a means of redress through a structured and transparent pay restoration mechanism agreed between my union, SIPTU, and the Department of Health and the HSE. Where is the roadmap for the workers at the Newport day care centre to achieve their pay restoration? Where is their means of achieving any kind of pay rise after a decade enduring a significant pay cut which was imposed without agreement? That pay cut was imposed as a result of a direct instruction from the HSE to the manager of Newport day care centre.

We know this facility is suffering from significant underfunding. We know it because the management of Newport day care centre has - in writing - cited underfunding as the reason they will not attend the Workplace Relations Commission; they have no financial means of addressing the claims of the SIPTU members working at the centre. As management will not attend the Workplace Relations Commission, the workers concerned have no choice but to ballot for industrial action. This is a publicly-funded facility. Surely the workers must have some means of redress, surely they deserve some hope after years of loyal service and surely there is a responsibility on the Minister of State to make this possible. I am asking her to include these workers in the mechanism for pay restoration for section 39 workers. Otherwise they will be left with no choice but to initiate industrial action. Nobody wants a strike to take place, least of all the workers themselves. It will take place, however, unless the Minister of State provides a means for these workers to press their legitimate claim for pay restoration.