Madam, - I agree with Minister Séamus Brennan that working beyond 65 should be a matter of choice. As he says, "The reality is that men and women are living longer, and leading more active lives in their later years". The irony, however, is in what follows.
I am a secondary school teacher and reached retiring age last October. I love the work and the people I work with, staff and students. I wrote to the Minister and secretary of the Department of Education and Science asking that I be allowed to work on.
I received from both a blank refusal. Their letters informed me that there could be no exceptions to the rules and that I must compulsorily be retired in August. My school principal was sent a similar letter with instructions to advertise my job.
I do not know whether I am the victim of a truly inflexible system, or of the casual cruelty of bureaucratic inflexibility. Further, though I am not trained in legal matters, it seems to me that any contract I signed to get the job many years ago which may have contained a limit, not set by a number of years, but by a term actually based on age would, and should, now be regarded as ageist.
Neither do I really believe that it is beyond the powers of Mary Hanafin or the secretary to have found a resolution acceptable to myself and to them. - Yours, etc,
MILO CONNOLLY, Beneavin Road, Dublin 11.