I am sorry to have to give out to a Minister of State who is trying to do his job well. However, as Deputy Barry said, this is a bit of nonsense. The Government had the opportunity to define within the context of this Bill the role of a Member of the European Parliament in relation to these two Houses. The first anomaly arises in the first page of the Minister's speech where no mention is made of the fact that two Members were elected to the Parliament who are not Members of this House. No provision was made in this legislation to give them rights of access to this House or, more importantly, to give them rights of access to the Joint Committee on EC Legislation. In the next four or five years we will be in a situation where a person who headed the poll in the largest constituency does not have rights of access to the Joint-Committee on Secondary Legislation of the European Communities. If the Government and the Department of the Public Service were doing their job these aspects of the role of European parliamentarians would have been recognised before they rushed in to discuss the rates of pay. The Government are determining the rates of pay without attempting to look at what the job specification means in practice.
We are engaged here in a bit of political window dressing which is a sequel to the charade that was played out in the Bremen Summit, when the British Prime Minister along with others was faced with the embarrassing prospect that the people might not come out and vote in the percentage numbers hoped for because of the stories about the salaries. We must get quite clear this business about salaries and resources to do a job. There is no way that Deputy MacSharry would sit in this House and take a salary tied to the standard of income in Sligo town, which would be lower than the standard of income in Dublin South-East. No Deputy would accept that criteria and that is what we are proposing in this Bill.
A political deal worked out at a Summit between nine Heads of State because they could not come up with a political formula that would work on some basis of equity is essentially their problem. We in this House should not formally give consent to the principle of different rates of pay for the same job. Will 100 years in the Labour movement and of the Labour struggle be turned upside down by this nonsense? The Government were represented last Friday evening in O'Connell Street by the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Labour at the unveiling of a monument by the President to James Larkin, the great Labour leader. What would be his comment on a different rate of pay for dockers in Dublin, Sligo, Bremen and so on? This is nonsense from the Government and I am sad for the Minister of State that he must sit here and listen to justified criticism.
The reality is that if we pass this legislation we will be creating a precedent for the Department of the Public Service and for future Ministers for Finance in the matter of differential rates of pay for the same job. That is unacceptable, and we are asking the Minister to let this legislation wither away until it can be dealt with properly by people who are competent to do so.
The nonsense did not start or stop at Bremen. It extends into the Department of the Public Service. Section 4 deals with a pension scheme, and so casual has been the drafting that an Irish MEP, to benefit from a pension scheme paid for by the people of Ireland, would have to serve 20 years before being entitled to a 50 per cent pension. He would have to serve eight years before qualifying for a minimum pension. An Irish MEP will not be given an opportunity to buy some years of service. In other words, if an Irish MEP wanted to serve only five years but was anxious to provide for some kind of pension, he is not being given an opportunity in the Bill to buy the extra three years to give him some kind of pension. Why were these things not looked at more carefully? If we have a Committee Stage these points will have to be looked at more carefully then.
Totally absent from the Bill and scandalously absent from the Minister's statement is any concept of the role of an MEP in relation to his Irish constituency. We are talking about the House voting taxpayers' money to MEP's so that they can become effective Members. They are being equated with Deputies and Senators, but there is not a Deputy who has a constituency the size of Munster or Connacht/Ulster. The kind of allowance being provided for here will not in any way pay our MEP's for the sheer physical job of looking after such constituencies.
There is no provision in the Bill for additional resources for MEP's with which to service their Irish constituencies. If the Government are serious about European legislation and about enabling 15 Members for the Twenty-six Counties to do their job in Europe, why has not this legislation incorporated some framework whereby Irish MEP's would have some scheme of resources to enable them effectively to represent their huge Irish constituencies?
I do not know why we are discussing this legislation. We are doing so in a vacuum. If we pass this Bill before the European Parliament has decided on the levels of remuneration, expenses and so on, we will run the risk of creating a gap between the kind of resources—I stress "resources" rather than salary and I will elaborate what I mean by it—available to Irish MEPs in relation to the difficulty of doing the work. Subsequently we will have to come back to waste valuable parliamentary time to amend this legislation when the picture has clarified itself.
It would have helped us if the Minister had given some explanation as to why he wants this legislation so soon, why he wants it passed before 17 July. I suspect he had hoped to get the Committee Stage today—the brevity of his introductory statement would give that impression. He has not told us why he wants the legislation before the levels of salaries and expenses have been established by the European Parliament. Of course it is only a physical expression of the fear by the Heads of State of the nine EEC countries that a level of salary and expenses on the scale of those on the Continent would create a scandal in Britain and Ireland because Dáil salaries and allowances are so low relative to the other member states, possibly with the exception of Luxembourg, which is in another category. The motivation behind the Bremen compromise was to ensure a good turn-out of electors on 7 June. By general consensus among politicians, we have had that turn-out and we should now look afresh at the whole business.
MEPs will be doing the same job in Europe whether they come from Donegal, the south of France or northern Denmark. If the principle of differential pay for Deputies coming from Donegal, Kerry or Dublin is unacceptable to the House, then surely the same principle should apply in regard to MEPs. If it does not, if the Government persist in this kind of nonsense, we can only assume that all the high-flying talk of the Minister for Foreign Affairs in relation to the European idea is not being lived up to.
The question of resources for Members of Parliament, whether in this House or in Europe, is a major one. All too frequently we confuse the minds of the public on this matter. Effectively there is an absence of resources to do our job. The public want a political service from politicians of all political persuasions and in the view of many members of my party, the greatest impediment to us in providing such a service is not the level of our remuneration but the absence of adequate resources to do the job, the lack of permanent offices in our constituencies, of assistants to take messages and to do some work in the constituencies, of persons to advice us in relation to legislation—general resources in personnel and facilities.
The submission made by the Select Committee on the Devlin Report points out how inadequate these resources are. Why, then, should the Government now be incorporating the same low level of resources for our MEPs? There is not a mention in the Bill of resources, other than salaries. Again it brings us to the situation where we are caught in a vacuum. We are discussing one part of a person's remuneration without knowing what the other part is going to be. We are trying to decide in advance on decisions which will be taken by the European Parliament as to what part of moneys should be made available to a European Member. In advance of that decision we could be 100 per cent right or 100 per cent wrong.
I do not realise why the Minister feels that he has to bring in the legislation. When the order for Second Stage of this legislation was first moved about three weeks ago Deputy Barry at that time sought clarification as to why it was introduced. Since that is on the record of the House I would expect that the Minister, his officials or somebody over there would have noted that question and would at least have seen fit to write in a paragraph stating why this legislation should be taken now. There is no justification for taking it at this time. If we take it we are going to run the risk of incorporating in law a precedent which I oppose, that is a differential rate for the same job. If you were to say to anybody employed in this House—for example, the ushers, the reporters or the journalists up in the benches—that they would get a different rate for the same job, can you imagine the reaction that you would get? Yet the Minister is asking us to accept it. We are told in a euphemistic phrase that the allowances for the European Parliament will somehow balance the scales and it will be all right on the day. That is not acceptable, and it confirms people's attitudes to politicians, that we do not have a capacity to be open, honest and direct in these matters.
I will quote Mr. "Tip" O'Neill, Speaker of the House of Representatives in the US Congress, who spoke at a recent discussion with congressmen who were debating their level of pay and increase in remuneration. For the record, on a recent visit to the US I took the opportunity to visit a congressman's office. The constituency of a congressman is similar in size to that of a Member of the European Parliament now. Their roles are different but their level of representation is the same. The resources that the congressman has, as distinct from salary, amount to a maximum staff of 18 people and a maximum amount of money of $.25 million to enable that person to act as a public representative on behalf of the people who have elected him. He has a suite of offices in one of the buildings adjoining the Congress and he has resources in his own constituency to enable a permanent representation.
Contrast that with the level of the responsibility of a Member like Mr. T.J. Maher, who is the best example to take because he is exclusively a Member of the European Parliament and nothing else, and consider the massive mandate that he received from the electorate and the critical importance of the agricultural sector to the province of Munster. What kind of resources are we giving to him and what kind of resources do the Government propose to give? Again, there is no reference to any of those matters in the Minister's speech or in the legislation other than the factual mechanical moving of the legislation in order to give effect to a political compromise worked out somewhere in the small hours in Bremen to accommodate a political sector point that has now passed.
I was about to quote Speaker O'Neill in relation to congressmen's pay. They are in receipt of an increase on the resources they already have which I have described. He was quoted as saying that if congressmen did not have the guts to pay them the rate for the job they should not be in Congress in the first place. It is time for people in this House and in the other House to say openly and honestly to the public that unless we get adequate resources—by that I mean sufficient staff, facilities and premises—to do the kind of job that is demanded of us, unless we get a reasonable rate for the job also, we are not going to be able to make democracy work. We spend vast sums each year on the Army and on the Garda who are, above everything else, protectors and guardians of the democratic system which we operate, yet we invest virtually nothing in that democratic system itself. That is the kind of nonsense we have inherited from the Westminster Parliament where the House of Commons was a plaything for wealthy gentlemen who had private resources and who could indulge their pursuit of power with their private means. That is not the case in this republican assembly, and it is to the shame of successive Governments that over many years we have been hidebound by that aristocratic model of a parliament instead of being inspired by what would have properly been a republican assembly which would enable any person who obtained a mandate to do the job that he or she is properly elected to do.
I will finish by saying that I am sorry to have to be so harsh in this matter and by asking the Minister of State——
