Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That was just something on my mind. Representatives of a number of workers and, obviously, officials from a number of Departments have appeared before the committee. The Army is one group that sticks in my mind, along with maintenance workers, caretakers and the like. We are talking about many people who are low-paid, embarrassingly so in some cases. Let us take the example of the Army, although I know ICTU does not represent it. Here one finds people earning less than the minimum wage. Rather than grasping the public sector pay nettle and trying to find a solution, we as a State just decided to throw allowances at them. Instead of saying that a person doing job X deserves to earn salary Y, we did what seems to me to be a uniquely Irish thing of giving that person an allowance. As a result, one sees many public servants, many of whom I meet, who are almost embarrassed by the fact that it is called an allowance, because it is incorrect, but who are also earning low salaries. Obviously, I hold the Government, successive Governments and all of us involved in civic life accountable for that but, equally, do the trade unions not bear some of the responsibility? Ms Nunan will have to help me out because we are going back some way in respect of some of these allowances, which predate many of ICTU's own appointments. Did the trade unions not sit around the table and agree this system of allowances? Did the trade union movement in its various guises ever jump up and down and say that we did not need an allowance but needed to get to the bottom of the problem? Did it ever say that what we need is not 1,100 allowances but rather to give some of those people decent salaries?