Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I compliment the Department for providing a table like this with such detail and very much hope that when all the corresponding Departments come before the committee, they can do the same. There are other parts of the public service where I want to understand this very point because the question of what allowances are for and who gets them goes to the core of the debate about them. A discussion like this helps me understand the matter a bit more.

Perhaps one of the issues we are facing here is the fact that "allowance" covers such a disparate amount of different things for everybody. The Department provided us with a very helpful document that listed all 65 allowances in the Defence Forces. I will not go into all the figures but that list contains allowances paid to rangers and somebody removing a possible explosive device. The list also contains the underwear and night attire allowance and the allowance for the editors of Connect and An Cosantóir. I put it to the delegation that this could be part of the difficulty through which we are trying to find our way. Since they are all seen as allowances, it introduces parity as regards activities and indicates that one activity is the same as another when, of course, this is not the case. The work carried out by somebody who removes something that could be a bomb is a very different kind of work compared to that carried out by somebody editing a magazine. Does the delegation have any observations in respect of this point?