GRATUITY PAYMENTS:COUNCILLORS WHO retired or who failed to be re-elected in last year's local elections received more than €4.76 million in gratuity payments last year.
Details of the payments paid out by 33 county and city councils showed that more than 143 people received gratuity payments whether or not they stood for re-election last June.
Payments ranged between just under €7,000 to more than €51,000 depending on a councillors’ length of service.
Ten former councillors in Meath shared almost €329,000 in gratuity payments last year while former Cork county councillors shared more than €326,000.
Other councils which paid out in excess of €200,000 to former councillors were Mayo, South Tipperary, North Tipperary, Longford, Clare, Limerick County Council and Sligo.
Kildare County Council would not release figures relating to the gratuity payments for former councillors. “Gratuity payments are considered personal information and we are not in a position to issue details of individual payments,” a spokesman for the council said.
Three other local authorities, Roscommon, Clare and Limerick county councils released the amount paid in gratuities but would not release details of payments to individual councillors as this information was deemed personal.
Noel Bourke, general secretary of the Local Authority Members Association and Cathaoirleach of Offaly County Council said the gratuity payments are justified given that councillors can give many years of service and do not receive a pension.
He said the payment was particularly appropriate for those who had “given long service in recognition of that service”. “We believe that councillors should be paid a salary in the first instance which takes into account the workload which they have and the huge amount of time they put into it and that some sort of a pension scheme be introduced,” he said.
Councillors who have served at least two years on the council will receive a gratuity payment calculated at one-fifth of their representational payments, a councillors’ basic salary, for each year they served on their local authority since since 2000. Where a person ceases to be a councillor before age 50 the gratuity will be preserved and paid when he or she reaches that age based on the applicable representational payment at that time.
According to regulations, gratuity payments, which are taxable, are made to councillors if they are not re-elected. “Arrangements for the payment of a retirement gratuity to local authority councillors . . . is payable on a councillor’s retirement whether voluntarily, failure to be re-elected, on death or due to ill-health,” a spokesman for the Department of Local Government said.