Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

I am glad to have the opportunity to conclude this debate. I would have to start by congratulating the Minister of State at the Department for Finance, Deputy Mansergh, for his powers of persuasion in persuading his colleague, Deputy Mattie McGrath, a Fianna Fáil TD who many would admire for speaking it as it is. Even today, Deputy McGrath recognised the gross injustice of what we are considering here, but he was prevailed upon by the golden words of the Minister of State, Deputy Mansergh, to which we are often treated. Pearls of wisdom that flowed from the Minister of State persuaded Deputy McGrath that he would have to leave his sense of fairness at the door and instead seek to use his influence within the party. It is a sad day when Deputy McGrath felt obliged to do that because he is allowing the Government get away with something that is grossly unfair. That is the position here and what we are voting on.

The Minister of State, Deputy Mansergh, was most economical in quoting from the high level review group. He found one quote which referred to the possibility of some anomalies. He has blown the possibility of some anomalies into a Government decision that is horrendously unfair. Let us be blunt. When the high level group made its recommendation that deputy secretaries should take a 12% cut and assistant secretaries should take an 8% cut, it did so fully in the knowledge that the pension levy had been imposed on these groups in the structure about which we all know, fully in the knowledge that the bonus system had been suspended and was now no longer applicable to these groups and fully in the knowledge of the progressive nature of the tax code the Minister had introduced in his previous budget which, naturally enough, asked everyone in every sector to pay more if they earned more.

Is it not remarkable that not one speaker on the Government side referred to the fact that the high level group, when it made this recommendation which was adopted by Government in the budget, knew all these things? Notwithstanding the existence of the pension levy, the suspension of the bonus scheme and the progressive nature of our tax code, it still recommended that these highly paid public servants should, in equity, take a pay cut greater than those on lower levels of pay. That was its recommendation which was very fair in any man's language. The only people who do not see that as fair are the members of the Government and, no doubt, some of those affected by these cuts who are now delighting in the fact that bonuses, which were never part of their core pay, are being given as a free pass to them to avoid taking the cuts everyone else has taken. It is an issue of fairness.

When the Minister goes back to his Department, he will see the clerical officer and the porter at the door working away. They are being asked to take much bigger pay cuts proportionately than the bosses in their comfortable offices who have had high pay, huge bonuses and so on over the years. Where is the equity in that?

Let us not forget the powers the Minister is using to make this decision. They are very clear. There must be a substantial inequity and it must be just and equitable in all the circumstances to use this power to reverse a pay cut imposed by the high level group. There is no substantial inequity. If the Fianna Fáil backbenchers were willing to come into the House, they would know that everyone agrees the substantial inequity in these pay cuts is that the person on the lowest pay has been asked to pay - the person on the minium wage, the person struggling to get by, the person trying to pay a mortgage and the person trying to cope with children in the wake of cuts to child benefit. These people ought to have been spared. If there was a grain of money available to show some equity and fairness, would they not be the people to whom one would turn and say why should the porter pay so much and a person on the minimum wage take a 5% cut and let us use a little bit of discretion to exempt some of these hard put upon people?

That was not the way the Minister nor any of his colleagues in Government saw it. They saw the assistant secretaries, the deputy secretaries and the 655 hangers-on to the same grades as the people suffering inequity. I do not agree with the Minister nor do many of the Government backbenchers.

This has nothing to do with tackling the nation's finances. It is enough to make a crocodile cry to hear Ministers lecture the Opposition about the need to face up to these difficult times. What are we being asked to do to face up to these difficult times? We are being asked to exempt the best paid public servants from taking their share of the cut. It is astonishing and unfair and most people will not forgive the Government for what it is trying to do here. I am not surprised people at the bottom level of the public service are angry and frustrated and are doing things which, in my view, are futile. They are angry and frustrated and they look up to the top of the tree and see these people taking advantage of a situation.

I was amazed by the table the Minister produced last night as if it were some great evidence and that we should melt away and say assistant secretaries are experiencing hardship. The Minister said the pension levy, the higher health levy and the higher Lenihan levy should be all taken into consideration in regard to the higher paid. What about the lower paid and people in every sector who have been paying all those progressive taxes? That is the nature of a fair tax system and it cannot be used to defend exempting those at the top of the tree from paying their share when it comes to cutting pay. It is offensive to see the resources of the Department of Finance being used to try to dupe us. No doubt one of these people on these high bonuses came up with this extraordinary matrix to try to justify what is unjustifiable.

Let us look at this honestly and fairly for a change. The net effect of the Government's decision is that assistant secretaries will take a 3% pay cut whereas the person on the lowest pay, the porter and the cleaner, will take a 5% pay cut. That will be further modified by the fact that in terms of disposable income, it will be less for the higher paid person. That is the effect of this. If one includes the pension levy, the effect is that these assistant secretaries will have taken an 11% cut over the two budgets while the clerical officer, who the Minister tried to pretend was walking away scot-free, will have taken a 10.5% cut. The person at the bottom of the administrative structure will take the same pay cut as the person at the very top as a result of the Minister's decision.

Let us look back at the history of this. The Taoiseach had the audacity to come into the House and pretend these high paid public servants suffered awfully over the intervening years and had been pressed down because they had access to the bonus. The truth is completely the contrary. Those assistant secretaries and deputy secretaries enjoyed a 78% increase since 2000 while the clerical officer at the bottom of the scale enjoyed a 48% increase, and the porter got even less. These assistant secretaries and deputy secretaries were privileged people not only enjoying their bonuses but enjoying bigger pay increases than anyone else. A pay increase of €64,500 was given to an assistant secretary while a clerical officer got only €10,000 - a six and a half times bigger increase in absolute terms for the people at the top of the tree.

The Minister had the opportunity to find the people who were suffering extreme hardship and substantial inequity, but to whom did he go? He went to the people who got the €64,5000 increase in the past eight years. It makes no sense and is an offence to fairness. That is why the Government backbenchers have put the Minister in the dock. He will survive this one but the sense of unfairness in what he is doing will resonate right through the system. It undermines the capacity of this Government to deliver the sort of reforms and the changes in work practice we need to see.

Let us be very clear. We are in a time of great difficulty and our public service will have to accept huge changes in the way we work, and we should accept that here as well. That is the reality of the world in which we live. One does not start a process of asking people to make changes to the way they do their work by singling out for exemption those people who are supposed to be the leaders of change. How can one justify that? Those people should lead by example and show that this is the time for change, for sacrifice and for doing things in a way they were never done before.

Instead, the Government used this Buggins's turn bonus system, where everyone got a slice of the action regardless of how bad was his or her performance, which time and again we were told should not be administered in that way. The high level group insisted time after time that this could not be regarded as part of core pay or something on which one should count and that one should get it only for exceptional performance above and beyond the norm. The Government, however, turned all that on its head.

We are at a time of economic peril. That is about the only thing on which I agree with Government speakers. However, the way in which we confront this must be seen to be fair and purposeful. The ordinary five-eighth should not be asked to make a sacrifice - they will be asked to make more sacrifices in the years ahead - by saying that our view of what is substantially inequitable about the recent pay cuts is that the people at the top of the tree have suffered a pay cut by losing their bonuses. Bonuses are gone in the private sector and no one is getting compensation for that. That is life. Bonuses were paid when the economy was successful. That time has passed. Similarly with senior public servants, the era of bonuses has passed. The Government's attempt to relieve them now and give them substantially greater pensions in the future as a result of this approach to bonuses is morally wrong, unfair to the people at the low end of the scale and will undermine the capacity of the Government to address the really difficult problems which lie ahead.

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