Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Decisions are made by Departments, particularly in regard to pensions. I know my colleague, Senator O'Loughlin, is deeply concerned about what I am going speak about now. The military service allowance is pensionable today but, at some stage, a decision was made that it would not be pensionable for those who were the early recipients of the allowance. Some sort of a deal was struck. The Defence Forces is not the first State organisation within which something like this has happened. In the case of the Garda, a number of officers who retired many years ago were not allowed to carry their pensions forward.

There is also the issue of pension abatement that was originally designed to stop high-paid civil servants retiring during the financial crisis with massive pensions and lump sums and going straight back to the Departments in which they worked or to other Departments and receiving serious salaries. If a private soldier, a corporal or a sergeant who retires from the Defence Forces after 40 years gets a job in the public service, the chances are that he or she will lose his or her pension.

There were two court cases in the State that went as far as the Supreme Court, wherein a pension was declared to be a property right and could not be touched. One involved a prisoner in Mountjoy who had a contributory old age pension. The State argued that the person was a prisoner and would have no pension. He said that he had contributed to the pension and that it was his. He took the case to the Supreme Court, which ruled that his pension was his. The second case involved a former Cabinet Minister who went to jail. An attempt was made to take his pension and he successfully fought the matter through the courts, wherein it was deemed that a pension is a property right.

I contend, and I think Senator O'Loughlin will agree, that pension abatement is illegal. It is theft of a property right. Pensioners from the Defence Forces and the Garda are most affected by this because they are forced to retire at 50 years of age, in most cases. If they come back into the public service, the Departments do not want to pay them a benefit for getting a second job. If Departments say that they cannot come back and have a full salary, that is fine, but they should not touch a pension. A pension is a property right. All the Members of the House will depend on their pensions when they reach a particular age. It is simply wrong. Let us be honest about it. For a private soldier, a corporal or a sergeant, and right up to the rank of colonel, the pension is not that fantastic. They talk about the golden pensions public servants have. Those are a long time gone. They were hammered in 1996, 2011 and 2013. The way things are going now, young men join the Defence Forces as commissioned officers, get a trip or two overseas and leave. We have to stop the theft of pensions and we have to return the military service allowance to those who had it. It should be part of their pension. I thank the Cathaoirleach for his forbearance.