Marymount Hospice not a sustainable entity  - Martin

Marymount Hospice in Cork city is not a sustainable entity, Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin told the Dáil. In 2017 he said the deficit was €300,000 and it will be higher in 2018.

 Peaking during Leader’s Question, Deputy Martin accused the Government of treating the hospice movement in a hard-hearted and deeply cynical manner by refusing to allocate sufficient funding to them and by refusing to allocate funding to cover pay restoration for staff working in these institutions as per the public service pay agreements.

During the recession he said these institutions were told that they had to cut their workers' pay in line with HSE employees. “However, they have been given no funding whatsoever to cover pay restoration,” he said. “These include highly respected centres such as Marymount hospice in Cork, Milford Care Centre in Limerick, St. Joseph's Hospital in Raheny and Galway hospice.”

It is not only hospices, said Deputy Martin. “There are hundreds of other organisations across the country in a similar situation which provide disability services, addiction counselling, services for carers, organisations such as Barnardo's and Barretstown camp for young children with cancer, the Disability Federation of Ireland, the Diabetes Federation of Ireland and as many as 768 others,” he said.

In response ,Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said those who work under what is known generally as Section 39 provisions, often hospices, charities and other bodies, are not public servants. “They are not bound by the rules that apply to public servants and, therefore, they are not directly bound by the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (FEMPI) Act 2015legislation,” he said. “When salaries are being cut or when salaries are being increased, they are not bound by the rules around public sector pensions. The way those bodies are funded is through a block grant from Government and those bodies have a lot of autonomy to decide how that money is allocated.”

However, Deputy Martin said that was the dishonesty of the Government's response. Correspondence to him states that as a Section 39 body, they were instructed by the HSE to stay in line with the HSE pay scales and apply the cuts as per the Haddington Road agreement. “All hospices were so instructed,” he said. “All of them have communicated to the Minister in this vein, and the other organisations as well. It is not true to say that they were not governed by FEMPI legislation and that they did not have to implement pay cuts under FEMPI agreements. They did.”