Mr. Séamus Dooley:

I understand the political instinct for survival and self-preservation, but the reality is that that is not an entitlement. As someone whose own salary and expenses are in the public domain by virtue of union policy, my instinct is to say that if everything was put on a website people would eventually get bored.

One of the members' colleagues, who also happened to be a journalistic colleague of mine in the Sunday Independent, tormented me for a long time in his previous life about salary and expenses. The way to deal with that was to state they are on the website and go look at them, and he was so bored, nothing appeared. Frequently, information placed in the public domain on a systematic basis means that the novelty wears off.