Alan Farrell (Dublin Fingal, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On personnel of a different type, secretarial allowances and overspends relating to assistants for non-office holders of the Dáil and Seanad, there are significant sums involved and I am somewhat confused about it. I would have thought that overtime would be fairly consistent in respect of those employment categories. By looking back at previous years, one could probably extrapolate the sort of expenditure to expect in any given year. A cumulative sum of €1.5 million or €1.6 million is significant. The report states that the estimate relates to pay increments and overtime. Obviously, the staff are on a scale and, as such, I would have thought it would be fairly easy to predict the increases. Why was that prediction not accurately made?