Mr. John Clinton:

I understand the question. What was introduced during the implementation of the Croke Park agreement was a clerical administration grade. The first intake of staff at this grade were people who transferred from clerical officer positions in the general Civil Service. They came to the Prison Service with roughly an 8% increase in pay but they were to do purely clerical administration duties, not to work on the landings with prisoners. Under the British Taylorist system, people called auxiliary prison officers are recruited and put in one place for one specific purpose and they only work in that one place. We do not do that here. It is not a very positive aspect of a prison service, and we would never encourage it. When we were introducing the annualised hours, a recruit prison officer came in at a lower rate than that of a prison officer but we incorporated into this a third level training course so that when they come in on the lowest points of the pay scale, they move up all the time and can become full prison officers. There is no-----