Croke Park deal working well

In common with his previous rants against the Croke Park agreement, Ivan Yates’s article (“Ministerial Muppet mayhem as Croke Park ‘reform’ exposed,” Irish Examiner, Feb 16) puts forward no alternative programme to bridge the deficit and meet Troika demands for a reduction in public spending and staffing.

He says public servants who retire this month will enjoy “concessionary terms” of up to 15%. In fact, public servants who leave will be subject to an average 4% pension cut plus, for those who retire early, substantial actuarial reductions to reflect their reduced years of pension contributions.

He suggests that any of our 300,000 public servants can opt to retire this month. The real situation is that only those at or near retirement age can do so and, regardless of their experience and value, most of them would be gone in the next year or so anyway.