Dáil Éireann debate -
Friday, 17 Jun 1983

Vol. 343 No. 9

Vote 2: Houses of the Oireachtas and European Assembly.

Minister for Finance (Mr. Dukes)

I move:

That a sum not exceeding £9,537,000 be granted to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of December, 1983, for the salaries and expenses of the House of the Oireachtas, including certain grants-in-aid, and for certain expenses in connection with the European Assembly.

The main changes in this Estimate arise on subheads B.1 and B.2, D.1, F.1, G, I, K and M. There is a decrease on subhead F.3 in relation to office machinery and other supplies.

I will mention briefly the subheads where there is an increase and indicate the reasons. On subhead B.1 — payment in relation to secretarial assistance for comhaltaí who are not office holders — there is an increase of £332,300 over the 1982 provision. On subhead D.1 — Payment in Respect of Secretarial Assistance for Seanadoirí who are not Office Holders — there is an increase of £17,800 compared with 1982. The increase on these two subheads arise from the fact that it was decided in May last year to increase the number of secretarial assistants for TD's and Senators. However, the full number of extra secretarial assistants was not recruited during last year and that explains the increase in the Vote for this year we have a full complement.

On subhead B.2 — Travelling Expenses of Comhaltaí. There is an increase of £104,390 compared with 1982. This provision covers travelling and subsistence allowances for Members of the Houses and also travelling allowances for Members of the Joint Committee on State-Sponsored Bodies. The outturn for 1982 was reduced because of our having had two general elections during the year. Consequently, for two periods during the year Members were not in a position to claim travelling expenses. That situation will not arise this year and therefore there will be an increase in the provision.

On subhead E. — Salaries, Wages, and Allowances of officers and staff of the Houses of the Oireachtas — there is an increase of £299,100. This arises from provision for the cost in 1983 of the third phase of the 1982 public service pay agreement with effect from 1 October 1982 and also provision to cover the cost of new posts in respect of committees of the House.

On subhead F.1 — Post Office Services — there is an increase of £652,100. This is to cover the cost of increased charges by the Post Office and the cost of extra facilities particularly direct telephone lines supplied to Deputies of all parties.

On subhead G. which is in respect of the inter-parliamentary activities grant-in-aid, there is an increase of £16,500. Again, this reflects the fact that during 1982 activities under this heading were reduced because of the two general elections.

Subhead I. relates to certain allowances to or in respect of former Members of the Houses. We have provided for an increase of £3,750 under that heading to cover the cost of increased rates of pension arising from the terms of the 1982 public service pay agreement.

On subhead K. there is a new provision of £11,000 for a pension scheme for secretarial assistants. This new scheme has been brought in consequent to our increasing the number of secretarial assistants for Members of the Houses.

There is a provision of £70,000 under subhead M. in respect of consultancy services for the Joint Committee on State-Sponsored Bodies. A similar provision was made in the 1982 Estimate. However, as the Joint Committee convened for only a short period in 1982, there was no expenditure but we expect that we will need that provision during the course of this year.

Mr. O'Kennedy

I have a brief comment on the Vote.

An Ceann Comhairle

Are we taking the Votes separately?

Mr. Dukes

We are taking them in chronological order but separately.

Mr. O'Kennedy

On Vote 2, the Minister has indicated that part of the Vote goes properly to the staff of this House in respect of the implementation of the third phase of the wage agreement. That is in line with the situation of everybody else both in the public sector and in the private sector. However, at a time when apparently there are views that the Government and other Members of this House are doing the opposite from what they are asking others to do, it should be pointed out that Members of this House are not getting the benefit of the third phase of the wage agreement, that they are not getting the benefit of the second phase of that agreement and that last year the payment of the first phase to them was postponed. I do not suppose that we should ever claim virtue here but — and I am tempted to exclude myself in this sense — if there is any sense in which we are exceptional in terms of wages and salaries, it is that we are the only group in the country who have not got the benefit of any phase of the wage agreement.

I am not saying that by way of defending the House but at a time when the manner in which we conduct ourselves here is said to be a matter of some concern and also when comment has been made in this instance by people who obviously did not have the full facts available to them — one person got a lot of publicity out of this — and when it was stated that we always ask others to make sacrifices while we ensure that we get every last penny, it should be made known, not so much in the interest of Members of the House but in the interest of what this House represents, that we are exceptional in being the only element within the public service not to benefit from the wage agreement. Whether we are deserving even of what we are getting is another question. I believe that we must deserve what we get.

We will all come and go as far as this place is concerned. I have been here longer than most and I have seen some dramatic changes but we hope that what the House stands for will remain. There is a special obligation on us to ensure that we avail of whatever facilities and rights are available to us whether by way of travel allowances or otherwise but in the interest of the role of the representative I reject very strongly the notion that a junior civil servant is better thought of in terms of status so far as travelling allowances and facilities are concerned than is a senior parliamentary representative. There is something wrong with our order of priorities and I urge that that situation be adjusted as quickly as possible. It is difficult for a Member of the House to say that but there is something wrong with such a situation. If there are cases of abuses in this House, we are bound by way of the Committee on Procedure and Privileges or otherwise to ensure that we will be the masters of our own decisions and that we will be answerable for them. We must ensure that at least we will be given the same level of authority and status as is given to the most junior civil servant to whom some of us are expected to be accountable.

Mr. Kelly

I support——

Mr. G. Mitchell

I indicated some time ago before Deputy O'Kennedy.

An Ceann Comhairle

I have called Deputy Kelly and if I have to give an explanation I will give it, whether it is wrong or whether it is right. I have called Deputy John Kelly because he is a senior Member of this House, an ex-Minister and a former Attorney General. I do not think I should have to explain it.

Mr. Kelly

I appreciate your courtesy in your explanation. I would not wish to be called first for any of these reasons. I thought I was in the House before Deputy Mitchell but that may be due to my bad eyesight. If I was not, I will be very glad to give way to him.

An Ceann Comhairle

I have called Deputy John Kelly and he should speak now if he wishes.

Mr. Kelly

I appreciate the points of view which Deputy O'Kennedy put forward. They are insufficiently known to the public but Deputy O'Kennedy has, perhaps, failed to grasp the reason why the public show such exasperation with people in public life generally. It is not simply because they are paid money for what the public wrongly perceive as very little but because they can see at different points of the parliamentary and governmental structure reckless and self-indulgent waste of money in certain small ways which do not confer any benefit on the vast majority of Deputies or Senators.

The question of State cars is not relevant to this debate and I will not dwell on it. Although I object to the system and have always found it wrong, to some extent it cannot be done without except by impairing the functions of Ministers who are trying to burn the candle at both ends in meeting the demands which are legitimately made upon them in their own constituencies and throughout the country. The system has developed elephantiasis and become swollen. There are a whole lot of vested interests now knitted into it and I do not mean the vested interests of parliamentary representatives and Ministers. There are vested interests at other levels which are knitted into that transport system which I believe contribute to the difficulty of dismantling it. It has become top heavy, unnecessarily extravagant and self-indulgent but there is a necessity for a transport system for office holders and no one with any sense would deny that. The irritant represented by the sight of unnecessary, self-indulgent and improper use of State vehicles causes resentment quite out of proportion to the immediate cause and it tends to spill over into everything else, including salaries and allowances.

It could be said that some Deputies do not really need any Dáil salary and would be glad to offer public service at that level if they were paid nothing at all and even if they had to carry their own expenses. There are a few very affluent Deputies whose personal dedication or, perhaps, ambition is such that the satisfaction of that dedication or ambition is worth more to them than the salary. There are other Deputies of whom that cannot be said who could not afford to offer public service or to give rein to their ambition, depending on whether one is cynical about one's colleagues or not, if they were not paid for it. It would be invidious and unworkable if Deputies were sorted out according to their characters and personal means. The best that can be done is to pay neither an extravagant nor a mean salary but a reasonable salary to them all.

Although I have a few angry constituents who write to me on these matters and will not believe me, no man ever made money out of being a Member of this House. I have been far worse off and my overdraft has been at higher levels during the two periods when I have held office. I hope that does not seem like a complacent effort at collective self defence. Deputies who do not do their job properly, who are complacent about a waste of public money generally and do not mind having a bit of it wasted on themselves, cause a miasma of suspicion and resentment to rest over all of us. That is a great pity. The answer lies not in trying to argue with the public, because the public must pay for this whole exercise, but in trying to enforce among one's own colleagues in all parties a responsible attitude towards the waste of State money.

We have been extravagant in the servicing of office and of office holders and of Members of this House junior to Members of the Government. When I was first elected to this House and made Parliamentary Secretary in 1973 the total second row of the Government consisted of seven parliamentary secretaries. That situation had not changed when Liam Cosgrave left office in 1977. The establishment now consists of 15 Ministers of State. The title has been up-graded and the explanation given at the time by Mr. Lynch——

An Ceann Comhairle

I might draw the Deputy's attention to the fact that this Vote does not provide for the salaries of office holders.

Mr. O'Kennedy

I appreciate the Deputy's theme but we are under a time constraint. We have only until 12 o'clock to discuss Finance and this really is not part of Finance.

Mr. Kelly

I will leave that point. The joint committees which the Minister referred to as likely to absorb some public money will undoubtedly absorb a lot of public money and the Minister is probably under-estimating for them. Although I respect and admire the passion of Deputy Bruton, Minister for Industry and Energy, to reform the way public business is done, I think his impetuous nature will be sobered by experience when he finds that it is very hard to get Deputies and Senators to attend committees, at any rate in the volume which he envisages.

I can recall from my time as Government Whip that even meetings of such important committees as the Public Accounts Committee necessitated the clerk of the committee having to rush around the House as a kind of informal Whip urging Deputies to attend. Occasionally he asked me for help and I told him that I had only one job which was to keep an eye on the Dáil and that I could not be responsible for whipping Deputies into the committee room as well. It should not happen that the Public Accounts Committee, toothless and very nearly barkless dog that it be, should be handicapped by a reluctance or inability of Deputies to attend punctually and take an interest. I fear that this rash of committees will suffer from that difficulty multiplied.

It might have been more sensible, if I may say so with all respect and friendship for Deputy Bruton, if he had started with one and not with the whole raft now proposed. The same applies in regard to the alternative committees proposed by Fianna Fáil. I am afraid that if they are all set up there will be a very large jump in the bill for providing services of one kind or another and at the far end we will not get a great deal because Deputies, who are by no means idle and are not hung over the bar in Leinster House in the way that malignant popular imagination pictures them, are busy at their constituents' affairs. It may not be what Plato or Montesquieu envisaged the role of the legislator to be, writing millions of bits of papers to councils and Departments. That itself is a money-consuming exercise. It is difficult to get Deputies to attend committees, particularly when there is no Press Gallery. The press are not kept out but they also suffer from budgetary constraints although they make little of them when it is the Government who suffer from them. They simply cannot service these committees either. They cannot send observers to Oireachtas committees, particularly if they are sitting simultaneously. Under this head we are going to get a large increase in expenditure and I am not too optimistic that we will get a good result, not for any defect in the idea but because of the human difficulties I have been talking about.

Mr. G. Mitchell

A great deal has been written on this and I suppose that paper will not refuse ink in this area. I have had occasion at a number of times in the past to meet deputations of people who want some lead from what they call "the top". When I explained to them that we have not had a salary increase since 1981 they expressed amazement because they were not aware of it. When you ask, say, a group of teachers if they would like to follow suit and so help to sort out the problem in the Estimate for Education they say "Certainly not. We should get our increases like everybody else". We have given this lead but nobody has followed. No journalist who has written articles about how well we live it up in here would work under the conditions and on the salaries of TDs. A great deal of the nonsense which was written was hypocrisy to make the paper barons more wealthy, and it does not do the journalists any good.

I do not mind coming under scrutiny for anything I say or do in this public office but in this area I ask that when people are writing about it they might take time to check out the facts. First of all, out of the allowance we are given we must pay for travel within our constituencies and a number of expenses in our constituencies. Under the rules of Schedule D, pages one and two, any business or enterprise operating under similar circumstances could charge all the expenses wholly or necessarily incurred in the execution of that enterprise. A Dáil Deputy is no different from anyone else. He must pay all the other expenses and meet all the other commitments that anybody else has to meet before coming down to the figure that is his income. We are supposed to have given a lead on this, but whom have we led? Nobody. Nobody has followed, nobody is interested in following. If we could explain to people what the situation is they would see it in a somewhat different light.

There is a problem with salaries whether Deputies attend here or not. In my constituency, for instance, all Deputies may not have attended here since the general election and those who do not attend are paid the same as those who are working here seven days a week. That is crazy. We should be thinking of a two-tier system whereby a person who is a full-time politician would be considered for a more full-time salary than a part-time politician who is very wealthy and has an income from other sources. Such a Deputy might not need a salary from this House and most of it would be clawed back in taxes anyway.

Taking expenses into account, the salary paid to Deputies is only a fraction of that paid to even a moderate ranking trade union official, not to mention a trade union leader or civil servant. No self-respecting trade union middle ranking official would accept the salary and conditions given to TDs. It is time to be able to stand up and say this. I do not want to seem to be looking for something for ourselves and telling other people to be moderate, but we have been giving this lead for over two years now and nobody has been following and all we hear is that we are living it up. That is not the case. It is time that we told people, particularly trade union leaders, that if they want to get the country straight they should take the same cuts in salaries as TDs have had to take.

The method of increases for TDs is nonsense. If a TD is worth an income as set by the Devlin Report we should accept that it was set at a certain level at a certain time and we should have gone on to tie it to a grade in the public service so that if public servants at that level got an increase the TDs should get one also, instead of having to lay an order before the House, wait 21 days, take the increase after 21 days and then wait for some months before it is calculated and given to the TDs. The press points out then that we got three increases, whereas we got only one increase but it is highlighted three times. We should get our increases when everybody else gets an increase and if nobody else gets an increase we should not get an increase. There should be no difference, no privileges for us, no exceptional route to take to get our increases.

This House is changing and has changed. There was a time when people came in here after a long day in the Law Library and worked in here in the evening. They were referred to as "the night shift". That pertains no longer. People now are full-time politicians who come from various backgrounds. What is not good for democracy is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for anybody from a working class or lower middle class background to come in here and function as a Deputy and compete with other people. It is said that if you pay peanuts you will get monkeys. My contention is that if you pay peanuts you get monkey business. We are leaving it open to TDs to fall into the temptation of supplementing their income from other sources, and that is very dangerous for democracy. TDs become dependent on sponsorship and on other people. I do not want to see that sort of monkey business coming into politics but that will happen if TDs are not thought of in the same light as everybody else with no exceptions. I am prepared to accept any reasoned balance or fair change. I do not seek to be treated differently from anybody else. The sooner we get this thing on a proper footing the better it will be for everyone. This nonsense of having to justify the very low salary for what is — in my case anyhow — a seven-day week would not be tolerated by the most junior of civil servants or trade union officials.

Vote put and agreed to.