Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 18 October 2012

Public Accounts Committee

2011 Appropriation Accounts of the Comptroller and Auditor General
Vote 36: Defence - Review of Allowances

10:25 am

Mr. Michael Howard:

On the 66 allowances, I will revert to what I stated at the outset and perhaps will elaborate on it a little. Basically, many different things are called an allowance. For example, the first one, namely, military service allowance, accounts for half the money we spend at present. After so many years, there is probably no harm to the public interest in stating it probably would have been called military service pay and not fallen into the allowance category at all but for-----