Vol. 65 No. 4
I move:
That the Secondary Teachers' Superannuation (Amendment) Scheme, 1968 prepared by the Minister for Education with the consent of the Minister for Finance under Section 5 of the Teachers' Superannuation Act, 1928 and laid before the House on the 7th March, 1968 be confirmed.
This amendment is being introduced in implementation of a recommendation by the Conciliation Council for Secondary Teachers at its meeting of 7th October, 1966. National Teachers have enjoyed a similar privilege since 1962.
The amendment provides for the retention in approved teaching service, of those members of the Secondary Teachers' Superannuation Scheme whose date of birth occurs in the last quarter of the school year for a period of not more than three months, provided such retention enables these teachers to complete an additional year of service for pension purposes.
Only completed years of service as a member of the scheme are reckonable in the calculation of pension and gratuity and this amendment provides certain members who would normally retire with a year of service almost completed with the opportunity of completing the year. It comes into force on or after 31st July, 1966. I think it will be generally welcomed by the secondary teaching profession as bringing them into line with the primary teachers in this respect.
There is no objection whatever to the confirmation of this particular amendment to the Secondary Teachers' Superannuation Scheme and I am glad to see that it was an amendment which was agreed at a council of the Secondary Teachers' Scheme of Conciliation and Arbitration. I always rejoice to hear references to schemes of conciliation and arbitration—I say this for the benefit of Senators generally and particularly for the benefit of Senator Dolan—because schemes of conciliation were introduced for the first time in this country by the inter-Party Government on 1st June, 1950——
But you paid no money. You had no money to pay and so you could be generous.
Not alone did we pay money but we honoured every arbitration award and it fell to Deputy MacEntee to say to the Civil Service in November, 1952 that he would not pay any money in or for the current year.
The temperature is high; it will come down later. I am trying to educate the historical sense of Senator Dolan. It fell to Deputy MacEntee to dishonour the arbitration award to civil servants in 1952 and we had civil servants parading the streets, as did the farmers, the milk producers, the telephonists and so on subsequently.
You tried to cash in on every stunt.
I am always glad to see the parties under a scheme of conciliation and arbitration getting down in an atmosphere of calm and quiet to solve a problem and producing at the end of the day, or of many days, an agreement.
If you have too much conciliation you will abolish the courts.
That is a consummation devoutly to be wished, but knowing the cantankerousness of human nature, we shall never achieve this desirable end. I am glad to see this amendment being introduced but it strikes me as rather odd that the Department of Education should take from 7.10.66 until 19.2.68 to get approval for this small adjustment of the scheme.
It will be retrospective, of course.
I think this is the first occasion the Minister has been in the House as Minister for Education and I should like to welcome him here in that capacity. I am sorry I did not take the opportunity of doing so earlier, but I am sure the Minister will appreciate the genuineness of my feelings in that regard. I am prompted to ask if this will be retrospective because retrospection—I am departing from the complimentary remarks now—is not a strong point with Fianna Fáil Government. That is what happened Deputy MacEntee in 1952.
Except with penal legislation.
Yes. I hope this will be retrospective. The only other point that occurs to me is that this matter was approved by the Minister for Finance on 19th February, 1968. Does it not take a great length of time before the machinery of the Civil Service and the whole apparatus of Government and of Parliament gets into action to get this scheme ratified?
I do not want to delay any longer but I want to stress one point. The Minister for Industry and Commerce was engaged on a Bill the other day on which I was suggesting that certain orders which were in fact amending sections of the legislation should be laid in draft before each House of the Oireachtas. I had pointed out to him that traditionally when such draft orders came before the House, they went through very quickly. I made the same suggestion on the Road Traffic Bill and on the Military Pensions Bill. So also this particular scheme comes before the Oireachtas and the Minister has no difficulty whatever in getting it through so far as this Party is concerned, and I doubt if the House will delay it any longer than I have delayed it so that any delay there is in bringing in the scheme rests with the Minister's Department.
It is very appropriate that matters of this kind should require confirmation. There are certain regulations which will always be laid before both Houses of the Oireachtas or, as in the case of this regulation, will require confirmation. In normal circumstances, neither of these procedures will entail great delay but they do maintain the supremacy of the people over the established Civil Service and that is very important at this time. It is very important that the people's Parliament should be supreme and not the civil servants who do things surreptitiously by making regulations and laying them before both Houses of the Oireachtas in the hope that nobody will ever read them. I hope there are some Members now assiduously looking at this regulation.
On behalf of the National Teachers' Organisation, I am pleased to welcome this regulation, which has enshrined in it a concession already negotiated by the INTO some years ago. It is a further step in the direction of a unitary teaching profession. I should like to appeal to the Minister and his advisers who are present to cut through the jungle of these pension regulations and rationalise the situation. It is totally inequitable that pension and gratuity on retirement should be based on completed years of service. It is grossly unfair that a person who has given 364 days of service is denied credit for that service just because it is not a completed year. All service must be taken into account in the calculation of pension and gratuity. If it is 39 years and 364 days, credit must be given for that total amount. I appeal to the Minister to have a look at this whole question of pensionable service as applying to the teaching profession and to rationalise it and up-date it to the situation which exists in Northern Ireland.
I should like to support Senator Brosnahan. As a teacher myself, I am glad to see the Minister is pursuing his already well defined policy of breaking through the barriers that exists in the various grades of education, national, secondary and higher, and that he is also extending that way of thinking to the various teaching professions. As primary teachers, we are glad that the same facilities apply both to ourselves and to the secondary teachers as regards salary and pension.
I also want to support the plea regarding years of service. I am sure there are many teachers, both national and secondary, who gave many years of service in a temporary capacity and did excellent work at a time when there was a surplus of teachers. I should like the Minister to take cognisance of that fact.
I shall be very brief. I welcome the fact that the Seanad sees in this motion a practical effort to get around to what I believe in very strongly, greater unification of the teaching profession at primary and post-primary levels, so that we can get away from what I believe are outmoded compartments in education between primary and secondary education and we can unify them all under the one system of education. Indeed, this order brings this one aspect of superannuation in regard to secondary teachers into line with what has existed in regard to national teachers. I should like this to go much further, and the recent tribunal report is an effort in this direction as well. All in all, I should like to see the time when there is a regional educational authority in every region in the country that would supervise all primary and post-primary education as we have known it heretofore and ensure that there is fertilisation among the various branches of education and that there is an overall administration which will provide the acquired co-operation among them. This is a matter to which we are giving a lot of attention in the Department. I have already made reference to it and I hope to be able to announce some practical results inside the next few months. I believe very strongly that we must get away from the old compart-mentalising of these sectors of education and get around to the idea of regarding them as one. This order is a step in that direction, a small step, but there will be far bigger steps which I hope to take in the coming months in this direction.
