Countless jobs lost in the public service

ADDING to the destructive attempts by a variety of vested interests to divide and rule Irish society by driving a wedge between private and public sectors, Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan stated in his budget speech that there had been no redundancies in the public service.

This is incorrect.

Countless numbers of public sector employees on full-time and part-time temporary contracts have been driven off the payroll in recent months and made compulsorily redundant.

Among these are some who have been denied their right to a contract of indefinite duration to which they are legally entitled under the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Workers) Act 2003 and many others who now may never be in a position to earn that right, however close they may have come to it.

Is this another example of those people referred to by that deeply offensive term “natural wastage”

Dr Ann Buckley

Maynooth

Co Kildare