Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

A starting salary of €87,000 a year puts Deputies in the top 5% of earners in the State. It does not stop there. We receive an incredibly generous travel and accommodation allowance, which is unvouched and not independently set, of between €9,000 and €34,000, depending on one's distance from the Dáil. There are also excessively generous additional payments for Chairs of Oireachtas committees, Ministers of State, Ministers, An Tánaiste and An Taoiseach.

I will give an example of what that means in real terms. My Fine Gael constituency colleague, the Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Frances Fitzgerald, has a basic take-home pay of €171,000 a year. My Fianna Fáil constituency colleague, Deputy John Curran, because he is the Chair of a committee, has a basic take-home pay of €104,000 a year.

As if these excessive rates of pay were not sufficient, nobody has mentioned the incredibly generous pension scheme of which Deputies avail. If I understand the scheme correctly, an average Deputy will get a pension contribution payment from the State of in the region of €90,000 annually. If they are lucky enough to do four terms in the House, that gives them an annual pension payment of €46,000 and a pension pot of €1.8 million. What do Deputies put into that pension contribution annually? They put in €5,000.

Nobody can say these levels of pay and pensions are not excessive. In fact, at some level no one can say they are not obscene. On a number of occasions in the past Dáil, Sinn Féin tabled legislation in the House to reform those payments substantially. Other parties, including Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, in particular, opposed them. Instead, we have the spectacle today of Deputies effectively saying they deserve a pay rise. I listened to Deputy Catherine Connolly very carefully. While I respect her opinion, this is a serious issue. At a time when people across the State are struggling to get by, the rates of pay of the people in the House is something we should debate. We do not propose to break the Independents; this is simply about saying that a pay increase is not acceptable at this time.

The idea that anybody in the House deserves, or indeed needs, an extra €5,000 a year is not only wrong, but drives a wedge between the public and politicians. That is the fault of politicians who are accepting this pay rise, not those of us who object to it. Like my party colleagues, I do not take home a full Deputy's salary. I invest the remainder in constituency services and my community, something for which I make no apology. In this instance, given the timing of this pay rise, I will simply not accept it and will instead return it to the Exchequer. The reason for this is simple. Nobody in the House deserves or needs a pay rise. If one believes and supports those very simple facts, then I urge every Deputy in the House to support the motion.

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