Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Whatever the Minister of State's personal aversions may be, I well understand why he did not read out the sentence because there is no good news story. The story that €324 million will be required to run this place for the next three years will not be regarded as a good news story. I imagine the Government will not be too keen to tell this story too vigorously, to use the words from the script. The worst part of the story is that it proves definitively - game, set and match - that in the mind of the Government there are two standards in operation. There is the standard of austerity and hardship, and in some cases brutality, for people who are just getting by, who are the average five eighths, the average, regular Joe and Josephine citizens who rely on public services, do their best, are perhaps out of work or get out to work every morning and do their level best to provide for themselves and their families. The story for this set of people is that the Government will come and pick their pockets time and again. When it has picked their pockets it will smack a big tax on the family home. This is the general gist of it. The other story is for a protected class of persons, some of whom are very wealthy, referred to as high net worth individuals. Some of them are in the upper echelons of the public service and Civil Service; they are small in number but they are there. In this protected category in the mind of the Government are Members of the Oireachtas. This is a tale of two realities.

Sinn Féin will not support the Bill and we will never be party to a policy, Government, attitude or outlook which has such a gross sense of entitlement by senior officeholders stitched into its very fabric. We believe this is wrong and that the least the Government could and should do is to trim its own sails, cut its own cloth according to its measure and bear in mind it is the taxpayer who funds all of this. The officeholders are not worth the €200,000 paid to the Taoiseach or the salaries paid to the Tánaiste and Ministers. I have heard the L'Oreal defence used before, but they are not worth it and the general public knows this.

In opposing the legislation I wish to state it would be advisable for the Government to go back to the drawing board and look again at the €324 million. It might even take on board some of the amendments I tabled. The Government should go back through the expenditure line by line and item by item, and if it wants cross-party support for legislation on the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission and for the spending and budget for these institutions which must be kept up and running it should do what needs to be done, and this means playing fair. The time for exempting senior officeholders and the Oireachtas from any of the budgetary pain must end.

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