Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will deal with Deputy Boyd Barrett's question first because it is important. There are two levels to it. I was trying to answer in detail a set of questions from Deputy Sean Fleming which differed from Deputy Boyd Barrett's. They will require further analysis. We have obviously carried out an analysis of the impact of taking €1 billion out of the economy in general terms but the exact methodology was not known until we had a draft agreement so we could not do that work until now. I have already written to a number of trade union officials who posed that question about the impact of it. The bottom line is a very simple one. We must make adjustments. We must make expenditure reductions. The methodology of doing it through a reasonable pay reduction and extracting costs from public sector pay is less impactive on the economy than some of the alternatives, for example, cutting expenditure on social welfare or other areas. We need to get €300 million this year and €1 billion in expenditure reductions by 2015. The impact on the economy generally will be of the order of 0.25% but I will give the Deputy the details when we have crunched the numbers effectively. That is not an avoidable deduction if we are going to reduce public expenditure to the targets we are required under the troika agreement to meet, namely, to get it below 3% by 2015. There is no avoiding this. One does this in a way that is as effective and least impactive on the general economy as possible.

The contention that the burden falls on low and medium-income earners in the public service is wrong. If one looks objectively at it, one will see that what people earning below €35,000 are asked for is some extra hours' work but no reduction in pay in most instances. There are people who receive premium pay and so on. The final point concerns the point people keep churning out about the figure of 8% for nurses. I have not looked at all the figures yet but in order to have that reduction, one would need to work something like 22 Sundays and premium days and have a disproportionate element of one's income on the premium side. We are trying to devise a fair pay deal for 390,000 people. Low-paid workers who work 9 to 5 and do not get premium pay should not be disproportionately hit either. In the round, this is a fair, balanced and, for that reason, complicated deal that I hope people will reflect upon.

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