A failure to honour pension commitments given to thousands of State employees when they transferred to the newly-established An Post more than 40 years ago is “an unfairness that needs to be addressed”, the chair of an Oireachtas committee has said.
Labour TD Alan Kelly , of the Joint Oireachtas Committee for Communications, addressed officials from the company and Government. He said staff had been promised that an existing arrangement – under which their pensions would be increased in line with pay – would remain after the transfer. However, “somewhere along the line, that just got lost and as a consequence, a significant number of people are at a loss”, he said on Wednesday. Kelly added: “Any right-minded people would say that is unfair and it is an unfairness that needs to be addressed."
Representatives of the company’s pensioners, about 4,500 of whom were part of the transfer, said many elderly members were suffering “real hardship”. This, they said, was despite the chair of the company’s board previously telling the committee the scheme was in “rude health”. Some, they suggested, were receiving less than the State old-age pension, which they are not entitled to.
Paul Moreland of Post Office Pensioners United, said the pensioners were “at a loss” as to how the guarantees they had been given by politicians at the time, and by their then employer, the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, had been ignored. He said “elderly people” were now struggling, with annual increases capped at 2 per cent since a post-crash crisis in the fund’s resourcing as pensions were left “way behind” current pay. The fund was, at one point, €500 million in the red, but now has a surplus of over €300 million.
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Fellow representative John Hearn told the committee part of the problem was a lack of representation for pensioners among the fund’s trustees. He said three of the six are appointed by the company and three by the union side. However, he said the union is primarily concerned with representing current workers at An Post and “sometimes there is a conflict of interest”.
Addressing the company and departmental representatives, Senator Rónán Mullen said “pay parity had been the order of the day, but somewhere down the line discretion had crept in and they (the pensioners) found they were worse off”.
An Post’s chief financial officer Peter Quinn and chief people officer Eleanor Nash relayed legal advice the company had received. According to the advice, while assurances given to workers applied at the time of the transfer, they did not limit the discretion of the company or pension trustees to decide on future annual increases that fell short of the improvement in pay awarded to staff.
They said the changed policy would have had to receive ministerial approval.
Kelly said they could not hide behind that. Sinn Féin TD Joanna Byrne suggested the company was displaying “a lack of humanity” towards people who took to the streets and country roads for 40 years of service to the State.
