Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State is most welcome to the committee this morning. This whole debate on councillors' remuneration has been going on for quite a long time, and I respect the fact an independent body has been set up which has already given an interim report, but not a final one. As colleagues said, what we need here are clear timelines. Obviously, the Minister of State is privy to an awful lot more information in terms of what may be contained in the final report than we are, but the whole narrative before the 2019 local elections was that there was an expectation in respect of councillors that this whole issue would be addressed, because the system that pertained between 2014 and 2019 was quite unsatisfactory.

There were electoral areas but particularly in rural Ireland that had ballooned. The workload of councillors had, in some cases, quadrupled because town councils had been eliminated and the redrawing of boundaries had moved some electoral areas from being four-seaters or five-seaters to eight-seaters or nine-seaters. There has been a recalibration there in recent times, and those areas have been reduced, but the workload has not been reduced.

The idea of a fair day's wages for a fair day's work is something we all want to see. There is cross-party support for dealing with this issue. While it is not popular in the media to increase the pay of politicians, whoever they are, most fair-minded people would accept that county councillors who are at the coalface dealing with issues on a daily basis are not earning a fair day's pay for a fair day's work.

In my nine years in this House, I have never been told by anyone from any side to pipe down. It happened under the Vice Chairman's stewardship. Usually when people say things off-the-cuff that they do not mean, they withdraw the remark. It comes as a very great disappointment to me that that remark was not withdrawn.