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A challenge by the Irish Medical Organisation to a former government's decision to abolish an allowance worth €61 weekly to junior doctors has opened at the High Court.
The IMO, representing 3,000 non-consultant hospital doctors (NCHDs), is challenging a Government decision in 2012 to abolish the Living Out Allowance for new entrants, paid where hospitals did not provide free accommodation to these doctors.
Because all junior hospital doctors are typically on short-term contracts, the allowance is no longer paid to any of its members, the IMO argues.
The action by the IMO and one of its members, Dr Gabriel Beecham, is against the Ministers for Public Expenditure and Health and the Health Services Executive who deny the IMO claims.
‘Breech of settlement’
The applicants claim the abolition of the allowance breaches a settlement agreement entered into in 2010 after High Court proceedings against the HSE.
They claim, as part of that agreement, it was agreed NCHDs would receive the allowance.
It is claimed the government later said Section 22 (4) of the 2004 Health Act allows them to abolish the allowance.
The court heard the allowance was abolished by the then Fine Gael/Labour government after the minister for public expenditure and reform announced savings had to be made in 2012 and subsequent years in relation to public-service pay and numbers.
The allowance was abolished in 2012 after all government departments were required achieve a 10 per cent reduction in overtime payments and 5 per cent in the cost of allowance payments.
The IMO and Dr Beecham, who worked a number of contracts as a junior doctor at Beaumont and the Coombe hospitals in Dublin, dispute that the 2004 Act allowed for abolition of the allowance.
Opening the action, Michael Cush SC, for the applicants, said the decision to abolish the allowance was taken “with no statutory basis cited at all. It was just done by the government.”
The action before Mr Justice Paul McDermott continues.