€200,000 pay cap urged by Burton

NOBODY IN the public service “higher echelons” should be paid more than €200,000 including “expenses and everything else”, according to Labour finance spokeswoman Joan Burton, who said the State could not afford the level of salaries being paid. She also criticised the €250,000 salary payment recommendations for hospital consultants.

Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan welcomed her comments on “top-level salaries as there are issues to address in that regard”.

He rejected a proposal by Fine Gael finance spokesman Richard Bruton that the annual unvouched €41,000 allowance paid to Independent TDs should have to be accounted for to an independent body. The Minister said, however, he had “considerable sympathy” for the proposal and would examine it in a “separate statutory context”, dealing with party leaders’ allowances.

They were speaking during the debate on the Oireachtas (Allowances to Members) and Ministerial and Parliamentary Offices Bill 2009, which cuts certain payments, allowances and expenses of Ministers, TDs and Senators.

The legislation cuts expenses by 10 per cent, ends the system of long-service payments or increments, and winds up, at the next general election, pension payments to former ministers while they are still in the Oireachtas or European Parliament. In the meantime, the pension payments will be cut by 25 per cent.

Mr Lenihan said the Cabinet and Ministers of State took a 10 per cent pay cut last October along with the 10 per cent pension levy, the number of Ministers of State was reduced from 20 to 15 and some Oireachtas members gave up their ministerial pension payments. He pointed out that 45 TDs and Senators had given up their long-service increments.

Mr Bruton said the €41,000 paid to Independents, unlike with party leaders, “is not vouched”. He recognised “that Independent deputies are entitled to access research support and legitimate matters” but “in a new spirit of realism, such moneys should be based on the presentation to an authority” of the “legitimate use to which that money has been put”.

Ms Burton said: “There is no reason anybody paid out of the public purse should be paid more than 200,000, all included, expenses and everything else. The country cannot afford the level of salary being paid to the upper echelons, such as secretary generals and heads of various Government bodies. Neither can it afford some of the extraordinary salaries paid to people working in commercial semi-State bodies, not excluding RTÉ.” She added: “I still do not understand why Minister Mary Harney put consultants’ basic salaries at about the 250,000 mark.”

Sinn Féin spokesman on finance Arthur Morgan said the effect of the legislation for ministerial pensions was that, for the rest of the Dáil term, “instead of getting 50 per cent as a pension, serving members will get 37.5 per cent – the poor things, we should really feel sorry for them. Does the Government want to give them a pat on the back? Should those people standing for hours in queues for social welfare congratulate these public representatives?” He commended those who had given up their pensions but “those others who have not yet handed it back have a brass neck, in my view”.

Lucinda Creighton (FG, Dublin South East) said all expenses should be published as a “matter of course” and this would end repeated media headlines about expenses.

The Bill, which originated in the Seanad, passed all stages in the Dáil. Some of its measures will only come into effect by way of a ministerial order.