Government not to oppose Bill to end mandatory retirement

The Government will not oppose legislation introduced by Independent Senator John Crown to end the mandatory retirement of medical staff at 65 years of age.

Minister for Health Leo Varadkar said the Longer Healthy Living Bill was timely because the "loss of highly qualified personnel who are still willing and able to fulfil key roles in our health service can sometimes exacerbate the workforce challenges which we are experiencing".

He said “the notion of public servants being required to retire at a relatively young age by today’s standards, even where they may still have much to contribute and be keen to do so” was one that society should revisit.

Mr Varadkar said the Bill represented a useful contribution to the debate, but he expected to propose “substantive amendments”.

Introducing the legislation, Prof Crown said current rules forced “healthy, physiologically young 65-year-olds to retire with no regard to their health, competence, experience or, critically, to their dispensability to the health service”.

He asked: “Are we so flush with trained, experienced staff that we can afford to offload them involuntarily?”

He said Ireland had the lowest number of career- level specialists per head of population in the OECD for nearly every speciality.

The NUI Senator believed that “all too often somebody who is highly internationally trained, often a research leader in their field, is being mandatorily replaced with somebody of lesser credentials”.

He said it was not good public policy and “it makes no economic sense to simultaneously pay a salary and a pension in respect of one position when the pensioner didn’t want to retire and is doing the job to a high standard”.