Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State is welcome to the House. I welcome in particular the unwinding of the financial emergency measures in the public interest. I was heavily involved in trade unionism at the time the FEMPI legislation was running through. I remember in particular the pain we inflicted on our public servants in the draconian way in which we cut their salaries.There were public servants who had bought houses and set their lives in train when, suddenly, along came the financial emergency measures in the public interest legislation and their lives were destroyed. It is good to see that it is coming to an end.

There is one question we have to ask. The Minister of State was not in power at the time, so this question is not a reflection on him. Last week or the week before, we saw Microsoft returning profits of €227 billion through a Dublin office without paying one penny in tax. How is that still happening? This country was on its knees in 2008 and in 2012. I travelled the length and breadth of Ireland explaining to members of my union why we had to take a pay cut. I feel such a cheat now because there are those in this country who are living a bloody good life and who never suffered at any point during the collapse of the economy in 2008 to 2009 or in the following period from 2010 to 2012. I appreciate the county had to get back on its feet but I am afraid the pain and suffering all went in one direction. The easy target was picked and that target was the public servants. I accept that quite a number of private sector employees lost their jobs, but the ones who stayed working, the ones who managed the vulture funds and those in the accountancy and legal firms all boomed during the collapse of the economy.

As my colleague has just said, the move to improve Sláintecare is fantastic. Let us see the hospitals work better for the public.

The seagoing commitment has been a failure. Our Naval Service is now what is referred to as a two-tier service. As a result of the three-year service requirement, there can be two sailors on the same ship, one having two years' service and the other four years' service, and there is a difference in their income. We have to go back and look at that to see how it can be rectified. Instead of helping with retention, this measure has exacerbated the issue of departures from the Naval Service. That needs to be looked at again and fairly quickly.

The restoration of pensions for public servants is a welcome measure. In speaking about the restoration of pensions for public servants, I will say that the public servants who have no representation anywhere are the Members of this House. We are hit with class K PRSI, which was brought in through an Act in 2021, as far as I remember. It effectively uses the social welfare system as a tax. Some 4% of our salary is taken and we get nothing for it. Deputies and Senators who lost their seats in the previous election had nothing to call on. Their social welfare records were broken and that will travel with them for the rest of their lives. That is fundamentally wrong. Another issue is that Members of this House who had been paying pension contributions into a long-service increment had this increment taken off them arbitrarily. I hope that is going to be restored as FEMPI is unwound because, at the end of the day, we are all workers in one way or another.

I will speak about an issue affecting members of the Defence Forces and An Garda Síochána in particular. Provision for pension abatement has been around since the 1920s, or certainly the 1930s, but it had never been enacted. It is now the case that any public servant who retires and then comes back into the public sector has his or her pension abated. A prisoner in Mountjoy Prison had his pension taken from him because he was a guest of the state; he was in jail. That prisoner took his case to the Supreme Court, which ruled that a pension cannot be touched as it is a property right. Unless the State recognises the property rights of those public servants who had paid for and earned a full pension and restores those pensions, such public servants will have to go to the courts and force it to do so. I have no difficulty with the concept of a person not being able to profit by returning to the public service, but this requires legislation to allow for different rates of pay or different pay scales. Right now, the Defence Forces are in dire need of specialist personnel, for example, armourers and artificers in the Naval Service. They cannot get qualified people to come back. Why would they come back? They lose their entire pension as soon as they step through the gate. Not only that, but they also run risks with respect to the future.

We are going to have to look at the issue of pension abatement. A pension is a property right. Indeed, a former Member of this House, whom I will not name, went to jail for improper actions and people cried out for his pension to be taken from him because of the money he had cost the public. At the end of the day, the courts ruled a pension is a property right. In addition to unwinding the damage done to pensioners through FEMPI, the issue of pension abatement needs to be looked at and the provisions in this regard repealed. If you want public servants with pensions who are returning to the public service to be paid less, then that should be done through their current pay rather than through their pensions. Their pensions are theirs. I do not expect the Minister of State to be able to give an answer on that matter today but I would like it if he would communicate with me in the coming days and let me know where we stand with respect to pension abatement. It is wrong in every sense of the word.

The seagoing commitment scheme was a great idea but it has not worked out in the way we expected. There was a latent aspect to it which has backfired. We need to look at that. We also need to look at the tax break that was available to sailors in the previous budget to see if it could be improved a little bit. These are all incremental steps which would bring us along the way.

Finally, we might thank the public servants, including Members of this House, who took a serious hit to keep this country in its worst times. I am afraid, however, that FEMPI will always be seen by those of us who worked in the public service as the most draconian measure and one which set out to target those who could not fight back. At the end of the day, we are told the country is on the up again. I agree with my colleague that Covid has set things back but the predictions for the future are good. I would hope to see some of the damage done over that period being undone. I wish the Minister of State the best of luck with the Bill.