Nurses, teachers, gardaí who feel undervalued and underpaid

It took a while but a generation of young nurses, teachers and gardaí is finally stirring. As memories of the “emergency” fade, stories of “recruitment into poverty” are filtering through, as the lived reality of the two-tier pay structure signed off by an older generation begins to bite.

The two-tier structure is often portrayed as a simple story of grasping elders selling out the young, the continuing story of Ireland as the old sow that eats her farrow. On the ground, however, a teaching entrant may find that an even younger colleague is on the old pay scale. Call it luck, call it inequitable or just call it the vagaries of life.

A year or more taken after the Leaving Cert or college to do a pre-nursing course, or a master’s, or to gain some broader life experience, could mean an income difference of about €8,000 between two people working alongside one another, doing exactly the same job. The lucky one just happened to skate into a job before the cuts.

An amorphous bunch of young people out there, struggling to gather up the rent money or save for a house? Nothing new about that, surely. Nurses, gardaí, teachers have suffered slaps to their expectations. Hasn’t everyone? shrug the critics.

Then again, “everyone” is not required to carry the heavy responsibility of caring for the sick and dying, or protecting the public, or educating the young, often under intolerable conditions.

The recent flurry of campaigning by these professions’ representative associations comes after several years of seething frustration by young members, outraged by the discriminatory pay scale and little action. At this point, few will voice their anger out loud because – as one put it pragmatically – “a house divided will never succeed”.

The gardaí

The flurry of campaigning by the Garda Representative Association (GRA) on behalf of its new entrants includes the claim that of the recruits qualified since 2014 (the first since the five-year embargo), three have already resigned as a result of the cuts. This seems extraordinary given that there were about 30 applicants for each post, with a stated starting salary of €23,171. But this week, according to the GRA, a fourth has given up.

These are extracts from the letter of resignation: “After careful and lengthy consideration and in no small part due to the mounting financial pressure brought by poor starting wages that have very little prospect of improving over the coming years I feel it would not be financially viable to continue. If stationed in a major city I do not feel I would be able to sustain even an average living standard.

“I have been given an offer of employment elsewhere with greater financial incentives and whilst I did not apply to join An Garda Síochána for the wages I do not feel I had truly grasped quite the disparity on the starting wage nor had I known fully about the pay freeze that has been causing so many other new recruits to struggle . . .”

New pay regime

Neither this nor the 15 cases cited recently in the

Garda Review

magazine can be verified independently since none of the writers was prepared to be interviewed.

A salient point in many of them, however, is how ill-prepared they were for the new pay regime, a point confirmed by one new recruit who contacted The Irish Times: "People tell us, 'you knew what you signed up for' – but most of us didn't. We joined knowing the risks to our own safety, we knew about the unsociable hours, but what the vast majority of us didn't know was how unfair, unjust and insulting the day-to-day salary would be for us.

“It’s only in the past couple of weeks that the 2014 pay scales were put up on the GRA website.”

This garda took serious issue with the figure of €31,000 given this week by Robert Watt, secretary general of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, as Garda pay after one year’s service.

“This represents pay levels for gardaí at entry level from 2008. This is the pay scale we expected to receive because there was no mention of a different pay scale beginning in 2013 until we sat in Templemore and discussed our contracts.

“The current entry level pay is €23,171. At present, yearly increments from this €23,171 are frozen due to Fempi legislation and so in order for myself and my newly recruited colleagues to reach the ‘fair’ wage quoted by Mr Watt, it will currently take seven years of service.”

While others cite the flat rate reduction and abolition of rent allowance as the most frustrating aspects, this garda is most disgruntled by the three-year increment freeze due to start in July, with a potential cost to new recruits of €6,000, plus a knock-on effect on future earnings.

A 32-year-old probationer, married with a child and a mortgage, quoted in the GRA’s cases, wrote that it was only after their arrival in Templemore that they learned that rent allowance had been abolished for new entrants. Another said they “just didn’t realise how difficult it would be to live on the low wages [and] we never had it explained to us how members working the same overtime as us would be earning twice as much”.

One based in south Dublin complained that his peers who joined seven years before him earn “at least twice as much as me in take home pay per week”.

“Today was a stressful day at the station,” wrote another. “I left the station worn out mentally due to the fact that I can’t bear to think of everyone around us getting far more than us. As it stands I literally live to work.”

A 28-year-old suggested that the €200 a week remaining after tax, medical insurance, car running costs and lunches, “is the same amount of money I would receive on job seekers’ allowance; however I work 60 hours to earn it. This is before rent. I had to move back in with my parents as I just cannot afford to pay rent anymore”.

Several contrasted their current earnings with previous jobs. One claimed to have earned more as an 18-year-old working in a newsagents, while another claimed to have been earning €50 net a week more as a clerical officer back in 2010.

Life-threatening situations

Another reckoned they could earn more working in Lidl “and have better social hours and not be threatened by members of the public”. Lidl pops up again in another case, citing the supermarket’s promise to pay the living wage of €11.50 an hour: “Not to belittle a Lidl employee’s job description or conditions, but I’ve already been in several life-threatening situations; people abuse me daily; I face disciplinary action if I don’t do my job a certain way; people treat guards like scum; a lot of people in my district hate me purely because of my job description.”

Many of the young gardaí, teachers and nurses talk of the “dream” nurtured since childhood of being in the force, or a schoolroom or on a hospital ward. Few will let go of it lightly. Acutely aware that teachers attract little sympathy at the best of times, this group has a particular dread of appearing to present “the béal bocht”, as one primary teacher put it.

The teachers

That Graham Fitzpatrick, a primary school teacher in Lucan, is prepared to talk publicly at all, is a sign of his deep frustration. At 30 years of age, he brings to the job a primary degree in the Irish language and French, along with a master’s degree in music and flute-playing proficiency.

Under the old pay scheme, those additional qualifications alone would have covered the rent on his Kilmainham apartment. Instead, a quirk of timing means the time taken to acquire them has left him €7,500 poorer.

“We are constantly being referred to as newly-qualified teachers but I’m three years in, fully probated and inducted – I’m just working on an inferior pay scale,” he says. “I don’t mind working alongside someone who is earning more money – as long as I can potentially earn as much money as her. But I can never get to where she is, in 40 years.

“But they know that I’m not going to walk into class tomorrow and teach to a lesser standard because I’m on a different pay scale. I think because it’s seen as a vocation, that we’re being taken advantage of . . . Those cuts were ‘emergency measures’ we were told and they were taken while we were all studying.

“Leading up to the election, we were told repeatedly, ‘the country is in recovery, the fastest-growing economy in Europe’ . . . Well, now is the time to reverse the ‘emergency measures’.”

He gives a wintry laugh at the idea of owning a home. “After total deductions, I take home €947.27 a fortnight. The rent is €675 a month and that plus the usual bills like health insurance – €90 a month – is close to half the take-home pay. I have to run a car to get to work. It’s 16 years old and s**t itself at the weekend. Over the last couple of months, I had to borrow money for the rent on a number of occasions,” he says.

Cannot afford health insurance

Shane Daly, a 23-year-old primary teacher also with a master’s and teaching in Sutton, Co Dublin, interjects to say he cannot afford health insurance. In his third year as a teacher, he is at the third point in the pay scale, which is about €34,000 gross or some €950 net a fortnight.

“ I’m not living on the breadline but I do struggle to pay the rent which is €650, so sometimes my parents might have to pay that or the car insurance so I can eat.”

Under the old scheme, he would have earned another €5,000 a year. “That would have paid my rent. I never expected a massive wage in teaching, but in just three years, I’m down €15,000 [compared with someone on the old pay scale] and we’re probably not going to see a substantial increase in the next 10 years.

“So I’m not going to be able to get a mortgage. If I was to work for 40 years, I would be down about €230,000 just on salary, not including pension. That’s [the price of] a nice house... ”

He works through the holidays, at Easter and summer camps, “anything to keep me afloat”.

The abolition of allowances as well as the “stepping stones” to seniority such as the posts of responsibility, have removed the chance of any career progression, short of aiming for the top jobs of principal or deputy principal, they say.

Deprofessionalised

Mary Jarrett, a solicitor who switched to primary teaching, believes that the profession is being “deprofessionalised”. “The OECD has recognised that Irish teachers are among the best in the world. Those allowances that have been cut would have included the Gaeltacht, special needs, literacy, recognition of a master’s . . . There is a need to have that recognition of your investment in education, going forward.”

Their view of the future is not cheerful. “I can’t survive till I’m 33 like this,” Daly says. “I’d go to Dubai or train up in a different career.”

Dubai is not for Fitzpatrick. He dislikes the notion of teaching in a society that is so “opulent” and will remain in teaching here. “But if I have kids, if circumstances change, if rents keep going up, I would have to work in a bar five nights a week.”

Do they feel they were sold out by their colleagues and elders ? There is a notable reluctance to say this. “I don’t blame my colleagues,” says Jarrett. “They were frightened and anxious about paying their own bills. The Government took advantage of their fear and imposed this cut on us . . . ”

Fitzpatrick agrees – to a point. “Was I disappointed by some of the decisions and some of the agreements we were tied to, such as the Lansdowne Road agreement? Massively. It has been portrayed as a situation where young teachers were sold out by longer-serving members of staff but these are our colleagues and for the most part they are extremely sympathetic.

“I feel now after the reception we received at Congress that we’re making strides towards full pay parity. We expect it to be a long struggle over the next two years”.

Jarrett believes there is a strong legal case to be made to the European Court of Human Rights about their situation. “This is not just a union issue but a legal issue.”

“It’s honestly a case of ‘how lucky are you?’”, says Heather Keleghan, a 25-year-old secondary teacher of music and religion, when she hears these stories. She cannot get a full-time job.

She works two hours on Monday, leaving her parents’ home in Glasnevin to drive to a Clondalkin school for 8.50am, then she drives over to Stillorgan for a 40-minute class at 10.25am. On Tuesday she had one class in Stillorgan at 10.25am and a second in Clondalkin at 1.45pm. Overall, she has seven hours of work a week. Toll charges total €78 a month, petrol is €40 a week but she only has to make a contribution for food at home. Last month, she earned €400 after tax. In school holiday periods, she is back on social welfare at €144 a week.

“I’m 100 per cent behind the campaign for pay equality but I can’t get a job. I would do anything to stay off social welfare; they don’t make your life easy. I know this is controversial but if someone offered me my own full-time teaching hours tomorrow at the lower pay rate, I would cry tears of joy . . . There are thousands like me. Too many want to be teachers in Ireland and there aren’t enough jobs”.

The nurses

By contrast, such is the demand for nurses, that side deals are being done to retain them in the State – “a huge labour market problem that can only be met by upward adjustments”, as Liam Doran of the Irish Nurses and Midwives’ Organisation put it this week. According to the union, the cuts meant nurses were “getting less than the minimum wage of €6.86 an hour”.

Now Doran has acknowledged that the pay restoration “moves some way to correct a serious wrong done to young nurses and midwives in 2011/12”.

Will it be enough? Is the exodus all about pay? Last Saturday, 24-year-old Jamie Moore graduated as a nurse after four years’ training in a busy Dublin hospital but already has her applications in for several London hospitals.

“I did a nine-month internship [fourth year] and it was one of the most horrific times of my life . . . You had six patients to yourself because of the lack of senior staff on the ward. You had that amount of responsibility, the only thing you needed to get countersigned was your medication. Apart from that, you were on your own.

“You should have been with a nurse and not instead of a nurse – and being paid a rate of €6.49 an hour, for running a ward. You’d start at 7.30am and wouldn’t get out till 9.30pm or 10pm – and you’d be back at 7.30am the next morning”.

Moore was one of those who suffered from the timing quirk. The first cuts on rates were to 80 per cent; the second were 50 per cent. “If I’d started in 2009, I would have been on the 80 per cent rate. But I took a year out to and did pre-nursing, so I only had 50 per cent.”

Was Moore not warned? “You are told but you’re very naive at that age. You still think this is for me and I really want this great career and you can go here and go there. And you’re quite sheltered in first and second year in college; you don’t know how bad it is. When you’re finished, you’re a broken woman,” she says with a hollow laugh. “ I used to go in crying and come home crying”.

Moore’s cousin, Elaine Lennon, is a 33-year-old emergency ward nurse, who trained in London and has worked in Australia (and came back with enough money for a wedding and to set up a house), as well in several hospitals back in Ireland.

Although they are clearly very close, Lennon is actively encouraging Moore to take her new degree to London, where “career progression is 100 per cent better and they really encourage you to train and pay you for those days”.

Back from Australia in 2010, she had to start on a junior entry point despite her vast experience. Her brother who graduated as a nurse recently is now working as a carpenter’s labourer in the United States.

Half a job

Lennon has left the wards to work in a private GP practice in Drumcondra. “It’s not pensionable but I get set hours and I can plan my life . . . I’m not running all the time and doing half a job, not going home with your mind racing, terrified you’ve forgotten something.”

Moore nods vigorously in agreement. Her exit plan ultimately has less to do with pay than “with not having the time to be an advocate for your patient. Our ethics lecturer in college was all about advocacy and how you need to be there for your patients and I said, ‘have you actually stepped into a hospital ward and seen how difficult that is?’

“I was never resentful. I never looked back and thought, ‘oh I should have gone to college two years earlier and I’d have been on a higher pay scale’. I did care that I had to get a second job to cover the rent and the cost of running a car. But I love nursing. I just don’t like nursing in this country. For the next 45 years, I’m going to be a nurse and I don’t want to be bitter now and hate nursing – because if I stayed in the Irish health service, that’s how I would have gone”.

They are both “born” nurses, says Lennon. “We’ve been wanting to be nurses since we were kids. If it’s in you, it will never leave you. But I would encourage young nurses to travel. Go to the UK and Australia and bring back all that experience and try and make the changes here”.

For now, Moore is set on England. “We see every single day that life is so short, so why get up to a job you hate every morning ?”