School secretaries and caretakers are at the heart of all school communities up and down the country. In September, 2,600 secretaries and caretakers were forced to take industrial action to deal with long-standing inequities, whereby they are excluded from pension parity with other school-based public service staff, including teachers and special needs assistants. They have shown extraordinary patience. They agreed to suspend their strike action and enter talks at the Workplace Relations Commission on the basis of assurances that they would receive pensions comparable to other public sector workers. The Departments of public expenditure and education have now reneged on these assurances and have failed to engage in any meaningful way with the workers' union, Fórsa. The talks have now broken down and schools up and down the country face further strike action and, indeed, closure. We have heard statement after statement from the Government, and from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Deputies, in support of school caretakers and secretaries but talk is cheap. I ask the Tánaiste today to instruct the negotiators to honour the commitments given and grant the comparable public service pensions to school secretaries and caretakers.

I thank Deputy Healy for raising a very important matter. Sometimes when you are in my position talk is not cheap and it can be detrimental to very important processes that need to be followed in our labour relations and industrial relations mechanisms in the country. I agree with Deputy Healy's analysis on the hugely positive contribution our school secretaries and caretakers, and the SNAs he referenced in an earlier discussion, make. On Friday, 5 September we had constructive engagement under the auspices of the WRC and agreement was reached that the Department and Fórsa would engage in a process to resolve the issues in dispute. Officials from the Department engaged several times with Fórsa under the auspices of the WRC. The matter has now been referred to the Labour Court. From my experience, in this House and in public life, I hope both sides can get into the Labour Court and engage in a meaningful way to try to find a resolution to this dispute, which we all want to see resolved.