Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I find it bizarre that we are actually discussing this issue at all. It is about people, who are directly employed by the State, who should at the minimum be receiving a living wage that is calculated as the minimum a person requires to live on. In the view of Sinn Féin, the minimum wage should be raised to a point where it reaches the living wage and that it should happen incrementally. There is, however, a point where we can start and we can compare the public service and the Civil Service against the private sector, but I believe that we, the Government Departments and public and civil servants should be taking a lead on the issue. We are not talking about a huge number of people. To put it into context we are probably talking about 1% of the Civil Service and 6% of the public service. There are families, some 3,600 public sector workers, who are reliant on additional State supports such as family income support just to get by.

Is it the short, medium or even long-term ambition of the Government to ensure that every public sector worker, that is everybody employed directly by the State, will receive, at minimum, a living wage? Is that something the Minister is willing or able to say? Does he believe they should at minimum earn a living wage or are we going to hear comparisons between those in the Civil Service and the private sector?

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