Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will make some brief introductory remarks and then make an appeal to the Minister of State. I am strongly of the view that most of us in this room are overpaid, certainly those of us who are Deputies and Senators. I have long held this view. I am also a little concerned that people watching this might get the wrong impression because this is the largest attendance at a meeting of this committee for a very long time. There are four times more people here than would normally be here. I do not want people to get the impression that the subject we are discussing today is more important than all of the other issues this committee discusses because that is certainly not the case.

We have a real problem and the Minister of State knows it. Councillors who are working full time, many for between 40 and 60 hours per week, are paid approximately €23,000 gross. If we want to keep the good councillors that are in the system and to attract new councillors into the system, particularly if we want more women, we must try to tackle that bit of the overall pay issue in advance of the next local elections. Having read the interim report however, it does not look like that is going to be possible. I ask the Minister of State to consider breaking this issue into two parts and dealing with the more complex issues and subsidiary payments after the local elections. I ask him to send a very clear signal to people who are currently considering getting involved in local government, people who want to make a really good contribution to their local community and who have to make decisions about child care, paying for children at school and so forth. If we are only offering them, at the top end, €23,000 in gross pay per year, they are not going to get involved or do the work. If we could fix that bit and then come to the rest at a later stage, that would deal with the substantive problem. I make that appeal to the Minister of State.

For the benefit of those watching who do not know the background to this, the remuneration for full-time councillors is at a level that I would not ask anyone to accept for a full-time job. This is not about us asking for significant pay increases for people who are already well paid. This is about trying to address the fact that if we want the right people for the job, we must give them a basic rate of pay that is appropriate for the hours that they work.