Colm Keaveney (Galway East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Where was decency when he voted with Bertie Ahern and his ilk for cuts in minimum rates of pay? He has more cheek than the backside of a retired jockey. God bless this country.

If we put our minds to it and if we were interested in resolving this problem we would refer this matter to an all-party committee, as we did for example when Sinn Féin tabled a motion on oil and gas. We eventually ended up with a report agreed by Fine Gael, Labour, Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil on how we should tackle our oil and gas problems.

I accept there are questions about the inequality of wages. I believe this started in the private sector where the gap in wages between top executives and the low paid at the bottom got wider and wider. Benchmarking, which was supported by all sorts of people in this House, including so-called left-wing Deputies, resulted in a loss following the pattern of the private sector. There were reasons for that, as the Minister of State will be aware. Given that people from the kind of profession in which he was involved before he became a Member of these Houses - attorneys of a high-level, doctors, etc. - can earn so much in the private sector it is not possible to attract them to work in the public service for normal public sector wages. We need a proper debate on all the connections in this area to see if we can come up with something that is fairer than the present regime.

The same considerations clearly apply to pensions where, after 40 years in the public service, one would get half of one's wages and 1.5 times one's salary as a lump sum - that was uniform across the system. The only difference between that and the terms applied for a Deputy was that it was figured out - I believe with justification - that it is nearly impossible to last in this House for 40 years, with the exception of the Taoiseach who is pretty close to that. Therefore there was a shorter timescale, even in the review of public service pensions, allowing for a full pension for a Deputy because it was felt that Deputies had to keep jumping the ditch time and again, and could be thrown out without any notice. It was felt that it would be nearly impossible to do 40 years here, particularly as most people are first elected with some experience behind them. Similarly, Ministers were required to have ten years as a Cabinet Minister before getting the full pension. It was paid at the rate of 60% but I believe, as with every other pension, it should be 50%. Perhaps the time required should be more than ten years. However, if one looked at the record of ministerial office and counted the number of Ministers who managed to complete ten years as a Cabinet Minister, or 20 years equivalent as Minister of State or a combination of both, one would find the numbers are very small. Considerably fewer people achieved that than the number of teams that won all-Ireland's.

The Government should agree to take seriously this motion on pensions and, accepting that it is a complicated and interconnected issue, amend the motion in such a way that it would be referred to an all-party committee of the House for a detailed examination involving the calling of witnesses. The committee would then investigate all of the issues and not take politicians in isolation because I believe our pay should be connected to some public service grade. I have always believed that a Minister should get the same pay as a Secretary General. If Ministers are overpaid then Secretaries General are way overpaid because Ministers put in much longer hours and are at much greater risk of losing their jobs. We should complete a comprehensive, agreed review. Instead of shouting at each other across the Chamber and making headlines in newspapers, which we will do by shouting, we should seriously engage in this issue and see if we can achieve consensus. I believe that if we approached this systematically and looked at all the angles of the issue, as we did on the issue of oil exploration, we would find considerably more agreement than we would manage in this debate. I suspect that level of agreement might not suit certain people. However for those of us who are serious about politics and serious about serving in the public interest, I believe it would serve politics.

I voluntarily gave up the severance pay for a Minister and am now earning considerably less than I would be if I had retired. In other words my two pensions would have been considerably greater than my present salary and furthermore, my pension will now be smaller because I stayed on here. I am therefore working for minus money or actually paying to work. I am happy to do that because money has never been an objective in my life. I accept it is good to have a salary - I have to live like everybody else, but it has never been the primary objective of working. I have always worked for causes, for co-operatives and so on.

For the good of future generations we need to stop talking nonsense that Deputies should be doing their job as a charity. Deputies need to earn their living and pay the bills like everybody else. To attract the spectrum of people into this House, we need to pay the going rate for the job which is agreed to be the salary of a principal officer. It is 100 hours a week. It makes no difference to me personally and will never make any difference to me now. I am too far on in my life and my career for it to make any difference for me. If I wanted more money I could simply pack in the job. We do not want to go back to the 19th century where the only people who could afford to be in politics were those with enough private income that they did not need to live from the income of being a politician. For many of us this is the only household income or by far the primary household income on which we live. If we do that we will find that people will face up to reality. We will bring some reality to this debate and could bring about the very necessary reforms that we need, not only in public service wages and pensions, but also in the disparity between the low paid and the high paid in the private sector.

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