Joe Conway (Independent)

I extend the House's welcome to my Déise Oireachtas colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy John Cummins. Only in the previous two hours, I received an email from one of my councillors but I will not say where. She gave me permission to use part of it in the debate this afternoon. I am using it in anonymised fashion and I will redact some of it. It states:

Dear Senator Conway, thank you for contacting me but this situation has been a real shock to me [she is talking about the lack of remuneration during time off for sickness] and something that left me a bit worried prior to my co-option, even though I took a career break from my permanent, part-time job to ensure I could manage the role. I live with multiple sclerosis - it is 28 years since the diagnosis - so I am an old hack at managing things now. Thankfully, my health is now reasonably stable due to excellent infusions but occasionally, like anyone, I can get chest infections and they tend to hit me hard due to the impact of infusions on my immune system. As yet, I did not have need for any time off work but it does worry me that if I got a severe chest infection or Covid or such, I might need a few weeks off or some extended time off and I would miss essential meetings and thereby be penalised for non-attendance. Additionally, it is not a given that you can stay on certain infusions forever and should I need to change, my health would not be as stable.

People with long term illnesses and conditions deserve to represent constituents in local government along with all other citizens, but should we not be in a position to attend meetings for a period of time due to illness, we would lose out even if appropriate GP certification is available to prove one is on genuine sick leave.

That is not any news to the Minister of State and I was a victim of that myself back when we soldiered together in the council in 2018. This is a stark and gross injustice to councillors. As far as I know, they are the only group of people - employees is not the word - who serve who are so victimised in that they have no redress when they go out on sick leave because, as the Minister of State and I know, their pay is docked if they go under a certain number of attendances. That is hugely unfair. This is not an isolated incident. This happens to dozens of councillors every year. When the Minister of State and I were on the council together, we often used to say to the city and county engineers it is your job to bring us solutions, not excuses. Routinely, governments have stated that councillors are an exceptional case because they are not really employees and it is a representational allowance. That is balderdash.

If there is a will, there is a way. Má tá toil ann, tá slí ann. If the Government wants to fix this tiny problem in the whole fiscal ambit, it can do it more or less at the stroke of a pen. It is time. It is time because hapless councillors are being penalised, year in, year out, not because they have done anything wrong but because they had the misfortune to get sick. That is not acceptable in this day and age.