Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As far as we are concerned, Deputies are paid too much. We believe the pay of public representatives should be linked to that of those they represent. In this way, public representatives would have an incentive to improve the lot of the majority. Part of the disconnect between politics and the majority of people is in the fact that the material circumstances of public representatives, in our case Deputies and Ministers, are on a different planet from those of the majority of those whom they represent.

Against that background, it is a no-brainer for us to state that it is unacceptable for Deputies to receive a €5,000 increase when somebody on the minimum wage gets an extra 10 cent an hour. Some 23% of workers in this country are officially low paid, a figure that has dramatically increased in recent years, and people on social welfare and pensioners got a miserable €5 extra per week, while a young jobseeker got even less at half of that - an utterly miserable increase. Secondary schools across the country are closed and may be closed for quite a long period if this Government does not relent, instead of refusing to pay the €6 per week extra per teacher that was promised to them under the Haddington Road agreement. The Government reneged on a promise, not the teachers - as suggested by the Taoiseach earlier today. The teachers stuck to the agreement and wanted to be paid €6 per week per teacher, some €300 per year, but it has been decided that we cannot pay that. We are willing to allow the schools of the country to close and to lock teachers and students out but it is okay for Deputies to get an extra €5,000 to take them up to the extremely well-paid salary of €92,000. That is unacceptable but the Government, and the political establishment of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party, do not understand how unjust it is.

I heard somebody say that Deputies worked hard and that is true but so do people who work in Tesco. So do nurses and many of them, I suspect, work a lot harder than Deputies. So do teachers and so do firemen. So do the ushers in this House, who will leave here an hour or two after we leave and who also do not have equal pay for equal work. It is not just the teachers and nurses who do not get equal pay. A teacher who joined after 2012 gets approximately €6,000 less for doing the same job than somebody who was already employed. We are going to give ourselves a €5,000 increase but we cannot give it to low-paid nurses or teachers or the ushers here who will leave an hour or two after we have all gone. Their family lives are often wrecked by the ever-changing hours in this House but it is okay to do that to them and to teachers, nurses and other public servants. I do not think that is acceptable. It is important to give them a shout out because they make this place function as public servants, like teachers and nurses make the State function.

If the Government forces this through we will publish where we are giving the extra money to. If it is next week, we will give it to the ASTI strike fund; if it is next year and the nurses are on strike, we will give it to them and we will publish other good causes where we will put our money.

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