Marie Sherlock (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I very much welcome the opportunity to speak on this important legislation. As a Senator elected to the labour panel following nomination by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and as a former SIPTU official, I am conscious of the real impact that the Building Momentum wage agreement will have on workers across the public sector, particularly lower-paid workers across the public service such as healthcare assistants, home helps, special needs assistants, hospital porters, staff in clerical grades and local authority workers. The reality is that if these workers worked in the private sector, many of them would fare much worse. In some ways, Building Momentum represents so much about what is good about being employed in the public service, which is job security, pay progression and protection for trade union membership.

The pay increases for many staff are very modest, with 2% over a two-year period or €1,000, whichever is of greater benefit. Building Momentum is not just a pay agreement. It is an agreement that commits to reduce working hours and provide protections on public service outsourcing. The trade union movement fought for and won those commitments in this country's darkest days when public service pay rounds were being negotiated during the bailout. There is a commitment to restore overtime rates and twilight premiums for certain sectors. The support within the trade union movement is very obvious. In excess of 90% of the membership of Fórsa, SIPTU and the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO, voted for this pay deal. Not every union could support this pay deal and we need to think of them as well. In particular, I think of the Medical Laboratory Scientists Association and other unions that have long-standing grievances that did not arise today or yesterday. There are issues with grade recognition and alignment that need to be resolved.

I wish to make three specific comments. First, I shall refer to sectoral funds, the focus on which is an innovation of this pay deal. Over the last number of years, we have seen calls within certain elements of the public sector and, indeed, some public sector unions. I have also seen some academics look on from outside and argue that we need to have sectoral pay deals. This pay deal recognises that we need a pay agreement for all of the public sector. We cannot pit librarians against nurses or pit maintenance workers within local authorities against some other public sector worker. We need to look at their pay together. However, there are some "stone in the shoe" issues. I am heartened that the issue of teachers' pay has made considerable progress in this deal but there are other issues, particularly student nurses' pay. There are other issues across the public sector and I hope that some progress can be made within these sectoral funds. I note that the Minister of State, Deputy Ossian Smyth, and the Minister, Deputy Michael McGrath, have said that the fund is conditional on the delivery of actual reforms elsewhere. We cannot have some of these long-standing pay alignment issues held to ransom by demands for reforms elsewhere. We need to consider those issues that have become a source of huge frustration within the public service.

The second key issue I would like to mention is the question of who is and is not covered, or who did and did not have a voice at the negotiating table in the context of this pay agreement. We have an ongoing situation where both the Defence Forces and An Garda Síochána continue to be denied a seat at the table. We have a series of opinions.Most recently, the European Committee on Social Rights highlighted that Ireland is out of step and in breach of the European Social Charter through its failure to allow the Defence Forces to be represented by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in the negotiations. That is not acceptable to members of the Defence Forces. I acknowledge there are measures in the Bill that relate to the Defence Forces but, ultimately, it is about their ability to be recognised and to have a seat at the negotiating table.

The last issue I wish to raise relates to the setting of higher level pay rates within the public service. There has been an unseemly situation relating to the Secretary General of the Department of Health and how the pay of that person was set in recent months. There was a group tasked with determining pay for senior civil servants but it was disbanded several years ago and we are now in a situation where the recruitment of senior civil servants is dealt with in a structured process through the top-level appointments committee, TLAC, but the decisions made with regard to the pay of those senior civil servants are vested in the power of the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform. There are serious questions for the Government with regard to whether this situation can be allowed to continue. The most senior civil servant in the State acknowledged when he appeared before the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment some weeks ago that it is not a good system. It is incumbent on the Government to put a system in place for determining pay because it is not good enough that while student nurses who were working were denied pay, the Government saw fit to grant a pay increase of slightly more than €80,000 to a person coming into the role of Secretary General of the Department of Health. That is not good enough. The optics of that decision and the message it sends to public sector workers is not acceptable. We need a new system to be put in place.

I welcome the Bill but it is only a bridge to a much longer and more comprehensive deal that needs to commence next year in terms of pay for public sector workers in the next decade.