Two Government departments were not entitled, after the State took over Trinity College Dublin’s pension scheme in 2009, to reduce by some €20,000 annually the €92,153 annual pension of a former secretary to the college, the High Court has ruled.

After the college’s pension scheme reached a “critical state” in 2008, the €279 million assets and €595 million liabilities of the scheme were transferred to the National Pensions Reserve Fund in 2009, Ms Justice Marie Baker noted.

She rejected the challenge by the Department of Education, Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and the Higher Education Authority, aimed at quashing the Pensions Ombudsman’s finding that Michael Gleeson, who retired aged 60 in 2011, should be paid the same pension entitlements as if he retired at age 65.

There was ample evidence before the ombudsman to find Mr Gleeson did not retire “early”, as the Ministers argued, and rather an administrative decision was lawfully taken by the college in 2005 to allow him to retire in 2011 aged 60, she said.

The ombudsman also decided that, in accordance with a contractual agreement between the college and Mr Gleeson in 2005, Mr Gleeson’s full pension benefit should be restored. The issue was not of early retirement but rather a change in Mr Gleeson’s normal pension age, he found.

The ombudsman was entitled to find the attempt by the Ministers to retrospectively refuse the augmentation of Mr Gleeson’s benefit “impermissible and oppressive”, the judge said.

Failure

The ombudsman was also entitled to find the college’s failure to apply the correct rule of the pension scheme was not such as to vitiate the 2005 arrangement with Mr Gleeson, she said.

She was giving her judgment arising from a situation where Mr Gleeson reached an agreement with the college in 2005 that he could retire at 60.

Some €544,000, the sum required to effect a cost-neutral augmentation of his pension entitlements, was transferred to the pension scheme and he retired in July 2011 at an annual pension of €92,153.