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SIPTU slams IBEC's pensions call

Thursday, February 14 10:36:31

SIPTU today slammed calls by employers group, IBEC, to cut civil service pensions and pay increments.

The union's General President Jack O'Connor was responding to a statement reported to have been made last night by Brendan McGinty, Director of HR and IR Services at IBEC.

Mr McGinty is reported to have called for the withholding of increments due to public servants, and for the cutting of pensions of people "who have spent their lives working in the public service".

Mr O'Connor said. "Mr McGinty has missed another opportunity to do something useful by keeping his mouth shut as very sensitive and difficult negotiations, in which his organisation is not involved, proceed precariously".

"Mr McGinty represents the most feather-bedded employer class in Western Europe, buoyed up as they are, by a corporate tax regime that his contemporaries across the Continent would give their eye teeth for, and which is subsidised by the Irish taxpayer."

"This is the same Mr McGinty whose organisation includes in its ranks the set of banking institutions which have distinguished themselves by bringing about the biggest financial collapse, proportionately speaking, in the developed world since the Wall Street Crash, for which our citizens will be paying for the next number of generations."

"With regard to pensions, what is wrong in Ireland is not that people in the public service have pensions but rather that, thanks to the efforts of Mr McGinty and his organisation, more than half of those who go to work in Ireland every day have no occupational pension at all."