Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am misinterpreting nothing. I am setting out what the legislation provides for. It would have been a better day out had the Minister provided for the full and orderly unwinding and restoration of all pay cuts to earnings below the €65,000 benchmark. That would have been a more orderly and fair way of going about this.

In terms of the higher earnings, there is, as I have stated previously to the Minister, a debate to be had about higher earnings within the public sector, whether merited or not.

He could have tackled those issues and dealt with that afterwards but that is not how the Minister has gone about it. Amendment No. 3 proposes the deletion of lines 3 to 29 on page 6. It deals with the matter of the restoration, in full, of the higher portion of earnings for higher earners.

Amendment No. 6 is also in my name and proposes that the phrase "Notwithstanding the generality of the foregoing, nothing in this section shall provide for increases in the salaries of members of the Houses of the Oireachtas or Ministers of the Government." be inserted into the Bill. If there is an emergency, it is incumbent on those who govern and on those who introduced all of these cuts to lead from the front. Amendment No. 7, which is also in my name, proposes the inclusion of the phrase "Notwithstanding the generality of the foregoing, nothing in this section shall provide for increases in the salaries of public servants in receipt of salaries in excess of €100,000 before the coming into effect of this section" in section 3.

Amendments Nos.10 and 16 are in a similar vein. Amendment No. 10 proposes to insert the following into the Bill:

(7) Notwithstanding the generality of the foregoing, nothing in this section shall provide for decreases in the pensions related deduction of members of the Houses of the Oireachtas or Ministers of the Government.

Amendment No. 16 proposes that the following be inserted into section 3:

(8) Notwithstanding the generality of the foregoing, nothing in this section shall provide for a reduction in Public Service Pension Reduction of former members of the Houses of the Oireachtas or Ministers of the Government.

This emergency legislation should not prove to be a Trojan horse or a mechanism for the restoration of the excessively high salaries or pensions of Members of the Oireachtas and, in particular, members of the Government. God knows there has been acres of coverage and comment - and legitimately so - on the truly scandalous pensions with which people walked away. Some of the individuals in question were party to, or instrumental in, bringing about the financial emergency in the first instance.