Vol. 226 No. 2
I move:
That a sum not exceeding £539,000 be granted to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1967, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Houses of the Oireachtas, including certain Grants-in-Aid.
I should like to make one point on this Estimate. We have a number of servants and officers of this House who for many years were in the employment of the State and who for some obscure reason, are not getting credit, for pension purposes, for the services they have given. I know the Minister may say that this is something that was handed down to him, something that was handed down over the years, but it is a shocking thing that people who will be retiring in the near future from the service of this House, and who have been in the employment of the State since the early 1920s, will retire with less service than those who came in ten or 20 years later. I would ask the Minister to have a look at this because a special Bill was brought before the House a few years ago to cover one person and a similar type of Bill could be introduced, if it was necessary, to cover the others. It is not that the country is trying to be mean about this but that nobody was forceful enough about the matter.
Perhaps the Deputy would get in touch with me.
I am perhaps in a position to say things which I could not with freedom have said when I was Leader of the Opposition. I say this now without any authority from my Leader, Deputy Cosgrave, and without prior consultation. For good or ill, we operate the Party system in this country: I think it is for the good. I often think that people do not realise the burden that falls on the Leader of the Opposition, or on the Leader of the Labour Party—in many respects a heavier burden than falls on the Taoiseach. The Taoiseach has at his disposal the very great resources of the Civil Service. I know I am oversimplyfying the matter when I say that every problem the Taoiseach has to decide is prepared for him and laid before him on a sheet of paper in the last analysis, if his Minister have not made any specific recommendations to him, or the Government, and his final function is to read the summary of the problem and decide yes or no. Of course, he has many other problems, presiding over the Government, directing the general affairs of the Government, but in the last analysis, it is true of the Leader of the principal Opposition Party that from his own resources, he has to formulate the problems for decision and then bear the ultimate burden of taking the ultimate decision if a consensus has not been arrived at by his Front Bench or his Party as a whole.
At present the provision made for his secretarial assistance is exiguous. It was fixed a long time ago, and expenses have risen and the standard of wages has risen and the provision now is grossly inadequate. The plain truth is that both the Fine Gael Party and the Labour Party are depending upon the help of staff who are accepting a much lower standard of living than their competence would procure for them outside because of a kind of sense of dedication to the political Party they are serving. The time has come to review that position if the Party system is to function with reasonable efficiency in Dáil Éireann.
There is one other matter I want to mention, and again I do it without prior consultation with my Leader, Deputy Cosgrave. I do not in any sense commit him and I am not authorised by him to make this proposal but I make it from my own experience as an ex-Leader of the Opposition. There is an insufferable burden on the Leader of the Opposition—and of the Labour Party—who is called to meetings all over the country, to which he ought go to meet the people and let them see him and hear him, if he has to drive himself. I could give descriptions now of the journeys the present Leader of the Opposition has had to make recently and I could give descriptions of some of the exertions I myself have had to undertake. Unless provision is forthcoming to provide him with the same transport facilities as Ministers enjoy at present, the burden will be almost unendurable. I must confess that when I was retiring from the leadership of the Opposition, one of the things that consoled me was that I had not had a car and driver because I would have missed them terribly. I do not see how the Leader of the Opposition Party, and the Leader of the Labour Party, can properly carry on their functions when there is not some arrangement made to provide transport for them to enable them to discharge their public duties.
The difficulty is that very often those public duties are of a strictly political character. They are going down the country as political leaders and I see a difference between a political leader and a member of the elected Government of the country. I would not want to suggest that the Dáil itself is even more important than the Government but that the Dáil should function satisfactorily is an essential prerequisite to a stable Government. I do not think the Dáil does function satisfactorily if those on whose shoulders the whole burden of the Opposition rests are to carry unreasonable burdens.
The last argument which I feel I must face is that I can understand members of the Government Party saying: "Why does your own organisation not raise the funds to make available a car and a driver for your leader if you want one?" The answer is that he has not got one. The work that the Leader of the Opposition or of the Labour Party does, while it is partly political work, has in it another element, that is making the parliamentary system work and maintaining parliamentary institutions. All practical politicians know the immense difficulty of raising funds and how urgently they are needed for constituency work and the ordinary organisation that goes on from day to day and the natural reluctance of the man who is occupying the position of Leader to indent on Party funds and ask them to bear the cost of a car and driver.
One of the great difficulties is that none of us is accustomed to the arrangement whereunder you keep a man servant. If you keep a chauffeur, what does he do when he is not driving your car? If he is a member of the central pool of police drivers and if he is not driving your car, he can be doing ordinary police transport work which certainly the Gardaí who drove me when I was Minister habitually did when they were not engaged in actually driving my car. I need not go into details of the kind of work they did but there is a good deal of Garda driving to be done and the system works out all right in that way. Normally it is a very expensive way of providing transport, but when you examine it, you find it is very hard to discover a more convenient way simply because in the kind of society in which we live the time has passed when we could, with any sense of comfort or normalcy, retain a man in service for no other purpose than to drive the car.
I do not want to ask for any prompt decision on this. I put it forward purely in my personal capacity and in the light of my experience when I was Leader of the Opposition. I would recommend to any Government to consider the desirability of making facilities available approximately equal to those now available to Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries, to the Ceann Comhairle and the Leas-Cheann Comhairle, for the Leaders of the Opposition and the Leader of the other recognised Opposition Party in the House, namely, the Labour Party.
