School secretaries and caretakers play a vital role. They are the glue that holds our schools together. Despite this, they are denied pension parity and, in the case of caretakers, pay justice. Teresa Cassidy is one such example. Teresa has been the school secretary in Gaelscoil na Rithe in Dunshaughlin, County Meath for 27 years. When she spoke to the Meath Chronicle in recent weeks she said school secretaries just want to be recognised and treated the same as their SNA and teacher colleagues. The management and staff at Gaelscoil na Rithe fully support Teresa. It is a matter of fairness. It is the same in schools all across the State. Yesterday Fórsa commenced a ballot of school secretaries and caretakers. Will the Government act? Will it deliver pay justice and pension parity and avert the risk of strike action?

I fully understand the issue the Deputy has raised. The ask is that there would be access to a single public service pension scheme. That is something that needs to be resolved through the industrial relations processes. We have made progress in respect of the salary side and the payroll aspect of this. Since September 2023, the Department has been providing a payroll service for formerly grant-funded school secretaries. Currently, 85% of school secretaries have opted for the new package and are on the Department’s payroll. That happened on foot of an agreement arrived at in the WRC in 2022. Until then, they had been paid directly by the schools as the employer. There has been progress made on the school secretaries front compared with where we were. As regards the pension issue, these are not easy issues to resolve overnight but it is something on which we will engage with the union.