OFFICIAL RULES aimed at curtailing the amounts retired public service staff can earn if they return to State employment are not applied if they are provided through employment agencies.
Under existing rules a person who has retired and is brought back into the public service cannot earn more than their original level of remuneration when their pension and new payments are combined.
In such circumstances the pension payment to the retired public servant is abated.
However, the Department of Public Expenditure said at the weekend these abatement arrangements did not cover retired staff who were not employed directly but who carried out work for the State through an employment agency.
“Abatement applies to a public service pensioner who comes back to the public service. It does not and cannot apply to someone employed in the private sector and working on an agency basis,” the department said in a statement.
Under the terms of a new EU directive, which came into effect in recent months, staff provided through agencies, either to the private or public sector, must be paid the same as those employed directly.
The largest employer of agency personnel in the public service is the Health Service Executive. It will spend about €200 million this year on bringing in agency doctors and nurses to work across the service. However, full details of the number of retired staff who are working in the health service on an agency basis are unknown.
Senior HSE management told the Dáil Committee of Public Accounts last month that although it discouraged the practice of retired staff returning to work in the health service as agency personnel, it could not prevent it.
HSE national director Laverne McGuinness said: “On the question of previous employees returning through an agency, we checked the matter with the lawyers [and] legally there is nothing we can do to prevent it. . . It is discriminatory. We have acquired some agency staff. We try to discourage the practice but we cannot legally prevent them from returning.”
Ms McGuinness said the HSE was very conscious of this issue, given that about 4,900 staff had left the organisation before pension changes came into effect at the end of last February.
“We made contact with the various agencies to do the discouragement piece. We asked for and legally obtained advice that we cannot prohibit them going back via an agency.”
Fianna Fáil TD Seán Fleming said there could be no deputy in the Dáil “who is not aware of the practice whereby medical staff who retire on a Friday are back on an agency contract, doing the same job, on Monday morning”.
Mary Lou McDonald of Sinn Féin said the issue raised all sorts of questions associated with fairness and equity if, in a climate of very high unemployment, people potentially on a full pension were contracted back into the State system.
“While I acknowledge people must earn a living, I believe this is a question of good practice and fairness.”
Separately, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Brendan Howlin, told the Dáil last week that there were 85 retired civil servants who had pensions of more than €90,000.
However, more than 5,000 retired Civil Service staff have pensions of less than €10,000.
