Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

I have given the Deputy the data as I have it in front of me. When we went into Government, I believed that the highest levels of the public service were paid too much. That is why in our first act, we set a new pay ceiling for the Taoiseach, for Ministers and for Ministers of State, which was significantly lower than the remuneration of our predecessors. We then set that ceiling across the public service. A couple of years ago, a Secretary General in My Department would have been earning €285,000. He is now earning €200,000. The €85,000 cut is an extraordinary reduction, and we have applied that across the board.

I am as anxious as anybody in this House to deal with this. We cannot take the ground from under people and tell them that their income will be halved overnight, given that they have contractual arrangements. The Deputy knows that we have constitutional property rights in this State. We have done it in a remarkably efficient way over the past 12 months. The Deputy is right that we have more to do.

As a former health Minister, I have looked at the issue of medical consultants' pay. We are finding great difficulty in recruiting medical consultants in Ireland. If our pay rates were so generous in comparison to the UK, there would be a queue out the door, but there is not. We have not been able to recruit medical consultants, particularly outside the major urban centres. I agree with the Deputy that they are paid too much. We need more transparency in respect of their public and private pay. All of this is a work in progress, and if the Deputy looks objectively at what we have achieved in 12 months, he will see that we have radically transformed the platform in which more progress can be made.

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