Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

I shall be brief. I wish to return to what the Minister of State said about consultations. He said there were consultations between the Judiciary and the Revenue Commissioners. Were these between the Chief Justice and the Revenue Commissioners? Who was engaged in the consultations? Will the Minister of State say which Minister talked directly to the Judiciary about the pension levy? Was there any indication from the Judiciary that its members did not regard the pension levy as something that fell within Article 15. 5 of the Constitution? On what basis were such discussions regarded as appropriate? Was it simply to put in place a mechanism or was something said to put the Judiciary under pressure to make voluntary contributions? Leaving aside the pension levy, what discussions, if any, have taken place between Government and either the Chief Justice or representatives of the Judiciary with regard to the public sector wage decrease? Have there been such discussions?

There has been talk about this. I agree with the views and concerns expressed by my colleagues, Deputies Flanagan, Bruton, Hayes and O'Donnell with regard to the publication of the numbers of judges, who, percentage wise, are contributing to the pension levy and the new mechanism to be put in place. That creates a league table. If we discover that only 30% of District Court judges are contributing to it, as opposed to 60% of High Court judges, there should be greater public esteem for the High Court. How would this work? Regarding the mechanism to be put in place by the legislation, will the Freedom of Information Act be excluded from it? If only percentages are to be published what access will there be to ascertain the names of individual judges? Are we going to create some sort of public Star Chamber in which judges are pilloried because they have not contributed to this? Are we going to allow a situation to develop which will be so fundamentally at variance with the intent of our constitutional provisions as to drive a coach and four through them?

Like every other Member of this House, I receive letters from teachers and low-paid people in the public sector who feel they have been victimised by this Government. Many of them cannot understand why people with high incomes are to contribute less by means of these emergency measures- or, in the case of the Judiciary, nothing at all - to meet the current difficulties in which the State finds itself, having to reduce public sector expenditure and our current expenditure bill.

The Minister of State said it is for Fine Gael to bring a referendum Bill before the House. We will do so. The Bill may come before the House early in the new year but the Minister well knows this Government has an automatic knee-jerk reaction to any legislation that comes before the House from the Opposition side. It lets it go through First Stage so that a discussion on Second Stage can take place but 99 times out of 100 it automatically votes down everything that is dealt with in Private Members' time. If it lets a Bill slip through in Private Members' time, it never gets dealt with in a committee. It is controlled by the Government TDs and it never goes any further.

The real question is not to let Fine Gael bring the Bill before the House but whether the Government recognises, in the interest of fairness, that we need a constitutional change to address this issue and whether the Government will support in principle the holding of a referendum with appropriate wording being put to the people because there is no monopoly of wisdom in the drafting of it. Different wording could have been used to achieve the same result. I do not believe, when it comes to constitutional referenda, that there are words formed on a tablet of stone that are so perfect we can never have a variant of them. Any half decent lawyer knows that the same thing can be said half a dozen different ways to achieve exactly the same outcome.

The real question is whether the Government is committed, in principle, to a referendum to address this issue so that there will not be a build-up within public opinion that it is grossly unfair that the Judiciary is excluded from application of the public sector wage decrease and that we will not see a degree of public outrage unfairly directed at the Judiciary because of the incompetence of the Government in addressing this issue.

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