A former secretarial assistant in the Dáil has won her claim for a lump-sum pension payout of €26,000 under a redundancy deal she took up more than seven years ago.
Ms Maureen Morris's success in the Circuit Civil Court will cost the Department of Finance hundreds of thousands in pay-outs to other Dáil secretarial assistants who opted for the same redundancy scheme.
Ms Morris, Frascati Park, Blackrock, Co Dublin, was employed by Fine Gael for 21 years as a secretarial assistant to various TDs and had been paid by the Department of Finance.
Judge Katherine Delahunt said she was one of a number of assistants who were neither public servants nor private sector employees and whose status it had been decided to regulate in the mid- 1990s. Ms Morris's pension, under her contract of employment, had been divided into two parts - a lump-sum gratuity at age 60 and a monthly pension.
Following her decision to opt for redundancy in 1997, she received a lump sum in severance pay.
Judge Delahunt said it was the Department's view that when Ms Morris accepted the redundancy package, her right to a lump-sum pension gratuity payment at age 60 had been subsumed by the redundancy settlement.
Ms Iris White, for Ms Morris, had submitted her client's pension had not formed any part of the redundancy negotiations and that at all times she had been unaware in accepting the 1997 pay- out that her entitlement under the pension scheme would be affected in any way.
Judge Delahunt said the pension scheme had been referred to in the redundancy settlement terms drawn up and accepted by both sides in the redundancy negotiations and staff had been told anyone who accepted the package would retain the benefit of the existing pension scheme.
Judge Delahunt said she considered the pension to be a fundamental term of the employment contract and any variation of the benefits to the detriment of the employee would have had to be explicitly addressed in the redundancy/ early retirement agreement.