Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the Deputy. My first budget announcement was that we could realistically target 5%, and that is where the figure of €75 million came from.

The Deputy was on the committee which examined allowances and he knows that when we drill down to see what are allowances, this is a completely different issue. I do not have time to go into detail with the Deputy but within the different classes of allowances, some could only be described as core pay, some are formally agreed with binding decisions of the Labour Court and pay agreements to be integrated as part of pay, while others are outdated or no longer of value. That is what we are working on.

The allowances issue was subsumed into the Haddington Road agreement. The €75 million becomes small beer when we speak in terms of the €1 billion agreement I managed to achieve with unions to change the system fundamentally and allow for real and meaningful Exchequer savings to be made, with flexibility to be agreed with unions to restructure the public service within the reform plan laid out.

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