Croke Park deal working well
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.
He dismisses the Croke Park redeployment measures without acknowledging that thousands have already been redeployed over the last 18 months, mostly to cover essential tasks vacated by staff who were not replaced when they left the public service. Just like the situation we now face.
He quotes selectively to give the impression that privilege days and ‘bank time’ remain in place when, in fact, they have been abolished under Croke Park. His figures on the numbers of HSE employees retiring this month are about 1,500 wide of the mark. It’s impossible to know where he gets his other figures about the HSE.
He’s completely wrong to say this “scheme” is intended to save €2.5 billion by 2015 and to imply that this ignores the costs of pensions. In fact, the total savings from 40,000 staff reductions and other cost saving measures under Croke Park are projected to save €3.5 billion in pay and pensions by 2015. The troika are satisfied that we are on course to meet that target.
He says unions rejected a three-month notice period for retirees when no such thing happened. Finally, he lauds the McCarthy report’s objective of cutting 17,300 public service posts and calls Croke Park a failure, even though it has facilitated a reduction of some 20,000 posts so far, with 20,000 more due under Government targets.
Bernard Harbor
National Secretary Impact
Dublin 1
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