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

It is to link the pay of people in here to average industrial earnings. That is our proposal, that is our policy and that is what we campaigned for.

I agree with the Minister on higher paid civil servants. That would also nauseate people. Low and middle-income earners, the vast bulk of public servants, were savaged with FEMPI but those cuts did not mean the same for the super-well-paid civil servants at the very top of the Civil Service, and that nauseated people too. We have a policy for that and we have put it across many times in this House.

That policy is that nobody who is paid out of the public purse should be getting more than €100,000 and that higher bands of tax should apply to anybody earning in excess of that amount, whether in the public or private sector, so that an end can be brought to the shocking differentials between the earnings of people on low and average incomes, who work just as hard as anybody in here, and the earnings of individuals who are on multiples of those salaries.

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