Can the Minister indicate what are the allowances or payments covered under paragraph (b) of this section? I know what they are in terms of previous enactments but what in fact are they here?
Committee on Finance. - Pensions (Increase) Bill, 1960—Committee Stage.
Sections 1 to 10, inclusive, agreed to.
SECTION 11.
Question proposed: "That Section 11 stand part of the Bill."
Other increases to the public service apart from Article 10.
As I understand it, Section 11 says that certain other people will not get an increase. Who are those other people?
Those who got increases under previous Acts.
Who are the people specified under the Schedule to the Act of 1959?
There was a Schedule to the 1959 Act which was very elaborate. This Bill takes over that Schedule and says that those under the previous Act will get the higher rate of six per cent. now—those that did not leave before 1955 are excluded.
I cannot understand it. The clause says that nobody gets an increase now who gets any allowance or payment not being a scheduled pension. What is an allowance or pension that is not a scheduled pension? It says that any person who has a pension who is referred to in Section 7 of this Act does not get an increase. There is a third category, persons specified in the Schedule to the Act of 1959. Then we go on to say that there is no increase in gratuities. I thought that gratuities always had reference to the pay at the date of retirement. If that is so, does not the effect of this section debar any such increase from being operative?
It excludes those other than people paid in the Schedule which was taken over by this Bill from 1959. That lays down that there is a certain increase for those who retired since 1948 and this section says that apart from those nobody else gets it.
I still do not understand it. It seems to me that this section cuts out people—that it says certain people cannot get an increase. Why? Must it not be because they are in certain categories? The section says "Anybody not being a scheduled person." Who was there employed by the State who is not a scheduled person?
People retired since 1955.
What is the difference between an allowance and a pension to those people? There must be some reason for putting it this way.
All these pension Acts have these words.
There must be some reasons for it. I think the Minister must be having as much difficulty with the pension legislative code as I had when I was in his seat.
It is very, very difficult.
I can understand that any person getting a gratuity will not have it enhanced by any provision of this Bill. That is clear to the ordinary Deputy. There is segregrated under this complex paragraph (b), apparently, some small restricted body of pensioners who must have been present to the mind of the Minister's advisers when they were drafting this section and they wished to segregate them for some reason as persons who are not going to benefit under this Bill.
The Minister must have had the experience that all of us have had from time to time, in office or in Opposition, that when you do segregate some category of persons like that, almost invariably you are approached with hard cases and it then emerges that maybe out of the whole army of pensioned public servants you have excluded perhaps 35 or 40 people from a benefit that everybody else pensioned from the service enjoys and that for some highly complicated abstruse principle enshrined in the Department of Finance regulations. It would be a great ease to Deputies to know, if it is now ascertainable, what is this restricted group of persons which paragraph (b) is designed to segregate from benefit under the section.
I can understand the principle of paragraph (a). If a pensioner in that category came to me I could understand saying to him; "Well, yours was a final settlement in given circumstances under an international instrument. Nobody ever contemplated that there would be any variation of that." I can understand that the gratuity carried with it no implication that there was a residual claim in the grantee to get a subsequent surplus because we could not take any of the gratuity back. But, I can find myself in very great difficulty, as I have found myself before, when small restricted groups of public servants come to me and say: "Why are we left out?" I am bound to say that my experience has been down through the years in this House that these kinds of restricted groups get left out and that they then start endless, weary agitation which is ultimately given way to but always after half the original applicants are dead and gone.
We have all had experience of the pre-1914 teachers. That went on for years in this House and successive Minister for Finance could do nothing about it. Ultimately something was done but by that time a great many of the most venerable amongst them were dead and gone and never got anything under it. Then we had the pre-1950 teachers. The same endless wrangle went on. Ultimately we did something about it but, as I think the Minister will agree with me, anomalies arose there because a solution was so long delayed.
What I object to in principle is the creation of small segregated groups who are excluded from a general benefit and what I am apprehensive of is that paragraph (b) of Section 11 may be creating such a group. If it is, I should like to know what that group is so that we could, if necessary, argue with the Minister the desirability of letting them in to whatever benefit this Bill confers.
Might I draw the Minister's attention to the fact that the explanatory memorandum that he was good enough to circulate, as far as I can understand, stops at Section 10? One of the reasons why I raised this matter was that I could not understand, when the Minister had gone to the trouble of circulating the memorandum in respect of the first ten sections, he did not add a paragraph in the memorandum about the section we are now discussing.
We lay down in certain sections and in the Schedule certain groups that are entitled to increased pensions. As I said, those are the regular civil servants who retired before 1948 and the regular civil servants who retired before 1955. There are also local authority officials and there are employees of harbour boards and, as well as that, teachers, guards, etcetera. They are all provided for in the Bill. Then we come along in this section and say that that is all, that nobody else is entitled to an increase in pension.
I can assure Deputy Dillon that I have not anybody in mind that I am trying to exclude. Indeed, I do not know if that is even necessary but the draftsman evidently thinks it is. The groups are all there who are to get their pensions increased but nobody else.
If I may make an addendum here, I take it from what the Minister has said that if in our experience of administering this Bill when it becomes an Act it transpires that there emerges an unknown and microscopic group of which the Minister knows nothing now who get caught under paragraph (b) their circumstances will be sympathetically considered?
Yes, certainly. In nearly every pension Bill somebody is caught out.
That is all.
Question put and agreed to.
Section 12 agreed to.
Schedule agreed to.
Title agreed to.
Bill reported without amendment.
Agreed to take remaining Stages today.
Bill received for final consideration and passed.