Alan Kelly
Question:1. Deputy Alan Kelly asked the Taoiseach the number of advisers appointed in his Department, including press advisers; and the annual cost. [40161/20]
View answerWednesday, 9 December 2020
Questions (1, 2)
Paul Murphy
Question:2. Deputy Paul Murphy asked the Taoiseach the number of advisers appointed in his Department, including press advisers; and the annual cost. [42050/20]
View answerOral answers (25 contributions)
I propose to take Questions Nos. 1 and 2 together.
Under the terms of the Public Service Management Act 1997, special advisers may be appointed to Ministers and Ministers of State. The requirement for specialist policy input and advice is a matter for each individual Minister to consider having regard to the area of responsibility and the support in place in the relevant Departments.
I have put in place a range of appropriate advisory supports to me in my role as Taoiseach. The make-up of my team currently comprises a chief of staff at deputy secretary level, a deputy chief of staff at assistant secretary level, a part-time economic adviser at assistant secretary level and three special advisers at principal officer level.
In line with the provisions of the Public Service Management Act 1997, two special advisers may be assigned to the Government Chief Whip. There is one special adviser at principal officer level assigned to the Office of the Government Chief Whip. The appointment of a special adviser to the Minister of State with responsibility for European Affairs is a matter for the Department of Foreign Affairs.
As outlined in the programme for Government, a number of reforms have been implemented to ensure openness and co-operation within government. These include the establishment of an Office of the Tánaiste and an Office of the Leader of the Green Party within the Department of the Taoiseach, located in Government Buildings. The special advisers in the Office of the Tánaiste currently comprise a chief of staff at deputy secretary level and four special advisers, three at principal officer level and one at assistant principal level. The special advisers in the Office of the Leader of the Green Party comprise two joint chiefs of staff at assistant secretary level and three special advisers at principal officer level, two of whom are part time.
The programme for Government also outlined that each of the three parties in government would nominate a press secretary. At present, the Government press office comprises a Government press secretary at assistant secretary level, an assistant Government press secretary at assistant secretary level and a deputy Government press secretary at principal officer level. The three press secretaries appointed across the three parties in government will be supported by the Government Information Service.
It should be noted that the appointment of the special advisers listed are subject to Government approval over the coming weeks, following which relevant contracts, including salary scale, statements of qualifications and statements of relationship, will be laid before the Oireachtas.
I thank the Taoiseach for the information. That is some whack of advisers. It is a serious number of them. I can tell the Taoiseach straight up if he were standing where I am standing, he would be giving out yards about this. In the past, when this issue has been raised, the Taoiseach spoke about how programme managers were brought in 30 or 40 years ago by the Labour Party and others. The proportionality is a bit different. The volume here is incredible.
How many vacancies are there at present? Does the Taoiseach have an adviser on issues surrounding Covid health, public health and the vaccination? Has anybody been brought in? This is not something to which I would have objected, to be honest. I just want to know whether the Taoiseach had anybody who would have helped him on this.
We have seen an awful lot about the issues surrounding the recent appointment of judges and the process by which all of it was done. We have been through it and we will go through it again, I am sure, in the coming weeks and months. With regard to the process by which these advisers put on record all of their communications, will the Taoiseach give the House the assurance that all communications from all advisers who work for the Government are available from the Departments in which they work, are accessible under freedom of information and are in no way hidden?
The Government cannot be accused, in fairness, of lacking ambition when it comes to spin doctors and advisers. It is set to break all previous records. In September, we were told there were a total of 64 special advisers costing more than €3 million a year. Now we have seen the Government bring in a new press secretary on up to €160,000 a year. This new spin doctor has come from the Murdoch media empire. He was previously the managing editor of The Sun in the UK, a newspaper renowned for its racism, sexism and, of course, the disgusting lies it told about the Hillsborough disaster. He was forced to apologise for an article that compared migrants to cockroaches and "a plague of feral humans". He apologised for errors in a completely inaccurate and racist article, which had the front page headline that one in five British Muslims had sympathy for jihadis. He declined to apologise for a cut-out-and-keep guide to what terrorists look like. Again, there are no prizes for guessing that cut-out-and-keep guide was racist. It does not bode very well for the Government's professed opposition to divisive politics. How does it square with that? On top of the bill for advisers and refusing to pay student nurses is the decision to restore the pensions of the likes of Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny who are former taoisigh. How can this be justified?
Are any of these press advisers the people who researched a speech of mine from back in 2016 to inform the Taoiseach's earlier attempts at deflection over the student nurses and midwives? Would their time not have been better spent overnight, instead of looking at a speech of mine about FEMPI in 2016, looking at the hundreds of testimonies from student nurses and midwives about their systematic work exploitation with the sick, with those with Covid and with those giving birth? Would those advisers not have been better looking at those testimonies and finding out whether the nonsense the Taoiseach is getting from the HSE is, in fact, the nonsense that we, and the student nurses and midwives, more importantly, know it to be? I would be curious. Who did that research and why were they not busy verifying a far more important issue about the hundreds of nurses and midwives who say they are being systematically exploited and not paid for the work they are doing in the front line?
In response to Deputy Kelly, to his credit, the system was introduced by the Labour Party back in-----
(Interruptions).
It was, actually. The whole of idea of a separate office of the Tánaiste at the time was-----
(Interruptions).
I have no objection to it. I think it makes sense in terms of-----
(Interruptions).
Where there are parties with different perspectives in government, and this is a three-party coalition Government, there is a need to make sure that the policy programme, as per the programme for Government, and the perspectives of parties are brought through. In respect of the offices that have been established for the leader of the Green Party and the Tánaiste, that makes sense in terms of common purpose but also in terms of making sure the agenda is delivered upon in respect of the priorities of each individual party. That is an important point.
In respect of health, the chief of staff has considerable experience in the health arena, as the Deputy will know, both in terms of personal experience prior to coming into a political adviser role-----
(Interruptions).
Hear me out, please. It is also in terms of the person's former capacity as an adviser, when I was Minister for Health and Children. There is also a unit within the Department that has been dealing specifically with Covid, even before I came into the office, and it is being dealt with at a very high level within the Department. Obviously, NPHET provides public health advice to me and to the Government at large. In addition, various advices can be ascertained from key people out there in academia, without having to hire people specifically in regard to that issue. As for communications and the work of advisers, that is FOI-able, and it has to be transparent and open in regard to all the work they do, which is important.
In response to Deputy Paul Murphy, I do not think it is fair to personalise this to the degree that he has in regard to an individual who is not in the House to defend himself. I can assure the Deputy that this is not about spinning anything; it is about briefing properly on what is happening in terms of Government policy and Government initiatives. That is the issue here in terms of the capacity and the competence of the person to be the communications and press secretary for the Government.
On Deputy Boyd Barrett's point, it does not take two minutes to check out a speech that he gave in 2016. The bottom line-----
The Taoiseach has not checked out the situation of the student nurses.
We, have actually. An investigation is being established, and the Minister is making sure. I do not know whether the Deputy submitted his testimonies for investigation.
So they can be victimised?
No, I think the investigation should happen because exploitation should not be tolerated and student nurses should not be abused and exploited. They should not be exploited, and any exploitation that takes place, I genuinely believe, should be investigated. If the Deputy has evidence of that, and I have no doubt he may have, it should be forwarded to the authorities. We will protect the nurses and the student nurses concerned, and those issues will be investigated. They need to be investigated because it is wrong and it should not happen.
The Taoiseach should take up the offer to meet them.
The old culture, and old habits, die hard. The whole transformation of nurse education is not something we should just erode and then happily go along with that, which is what the Deputy is really suggesting. He has not dealt with that question at all in any of his comments on this to date. I have to say that.
I have.
The Deputy’s speech back in 2016 meant, and People Before Profit’s position was, that the financial emergency measures in the public interest, FEMPI, should be repealed in their entirety. If FEMPI was repealed in its entirety, it would have meant that with regard to the pension reversals to which Deputies Boyd Barrett and Paul Murphy referred, those people would have got their higher pensions and would have had their cuts reversed back in 2016, not in 2021. Legally, the Minister had no choice. In 2017, this House passed legislation to say that the latest date that a Minister could delay for this last cohort, whose pensions and pay was cut as a result of FEMPI, was the end of this month. That is the law passed by this Parliament. The Deputy seems to think that the Minister, Deputy Michael McGrath, should just break the law. That is what the Deputy is saying: that the Minister must ignore the law passed by this House in 2017, which the Deputies were all involved in at the time.
We can change the law.
No, we cannot actually do that without undermining the entire edifice. That is the point.
We are the Parliament.
Of course, the Deputy pretends that this is a deliberate and premeditated act to look after the high rollers, and he knows damn well it is not. He knows it is not. If he had his way, he would have been doing this in 2016, given that is what he proposed at that time. That is the reality.
They do not have to be paid over €100,000.
Taxation is the way to deal with that.
Bring it in.
We have. We have one of the most progressive taxation systems in Europe. The higher that people earn in this country, the more they should be taxed, and that is the reality. That is the fairest way to deal with this, not the approach the Deputy takes, which is just short-term political opportunism, deliberately distorting the truth and deliberately giving false narratives in terms of the motivations of the current holders of office in government, when the current Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform had simply no legal choice. The Attorney General's advice is exactly the same as the previous Attorney General's advice, and the one before that.