Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)

The point I was making earlier is that there might be people watching this who could only dream of what people would see as gold-plated pensions, of €2 million with €200,000 tax-free. The chargeable excess tax is not something that is unknown to senior civil servants at that level. Some of these senior civil servants may have left the Department of Finance or the Department of public expenditure. They are people who are well used to this tax. How under God does this go on for so long without anybody saying "I have been given over a quarter of a million euro more than I should get"?