Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased we are having this debate. It is more than timely. To the best of my recollection, although I have not checked the transcripts of the debate on the previous Bill, we did not have this conversation three years ago. That is unfortunate. It is a conversation we should have had in this Chamber, but it appears we did not. The fact we are doing so now is illustrative of the degree of frustration our secretarial assistant colleagues are experiencing at present and have been experiencing over the past couple of years.

We talk a great deal, both inside and outside this Chamber, about the concept of a living wage. If we are serious about the introduction of a living wage and transforming the minimum wage to a living wage, the Government must lead by example. The truth is there has not been a real discussion at Government level about the prospect of a living wage since 2015, when I established a Government forum on the living wage. A few months later, as soon as the good people of Louth in their wisdom gave me their direction, by a small margin in the election of February 2016, that they no longer required my services, the next Government simply stopped talking about it. We know the living wage is an ambition of the programme for Government, but I will believe that when I see it. I say that because when a government treats its employees and those whom it is responsible for paying in this way, we must question its commitment to transform the national minimum wage that is paid to a significant number - tens of thousands - of private sector workers. We must ask if it is serious about introducing a living wage in this country.

It would cost a very small amount of money to ensure every public sector worker and those who are paid out of public sector funds would be on the living wage. Remember that the living wage rate is considered to be a reasonable amount of money on an hourly basis that a single person would require to live some type of moderate existence. It is not extravagant but a moderate, basic level of existence. I ask the Minister to reflect on that. By the way, I have some sympathy for the Minister in terms of the demands made on him or his officials to meet the staff who are affected. It seems that given how this is organised and given his consent is required to sign off on anything, that would make things legally difficult for the Minister. I understand and appreciate that, but he could send a political signal that he wants to see a system introduced that is fair for the secretarial assistants. I genuinely believe that is something the Minister wants to see. I know he is committed to public service. While we all may disagree politically and have different philosophical, ideological and economic views, I appeal to the Minister to send a political message that he wants this matter resolved in the interests of those on whom we depend in our offices each day to provide the service we are elected to deliver.

This Bill is fundamentally about enabling this Legislature to run and to be run well. I am glad the Minister put on the record at the outset his gratitude to staff, here and across the public service, who worked so hard in the very challenging circumstances of the pandemic to respond to the demands that were placed on this House and to ensure the House could continue to operate. I put my thanks and gratitude on the record to the staff who made that happen and allowed us to fulfil our democratic mandate, because people have been looking to us for leadership. Regardless of political mistakes and so forth that may have been made in the management of the pandemic, we in this House all united and were enabled to meet when things were very difficult for this country. We hope we will not see the difficulties experienced over the past two years resurface.

This place has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. My first full-time job after college was working here as a secretarial assistant in 1998.

I know I look far too young to have worked as a secretarial assistant back in 1998. Deputy Shortall, who has joined us, will remember that a Member could only rely on one staff member at that stage. That staff member was a secretarial assistant who would have fulfilled several different roles until the role of the parliamentary assistant came along. That was an addition Deputies at the time very much welcomed and a resource we all use well.

I was reflecting earlier that back in 1998 I first came into these Houses as an employee of a Labour Party Deputy, Derek McDowell, who happened to be the party spokesperson on finance. Little did I know that quite some years later I would be fulfilling that function myself. It is interesting how things move on and evolve. In 1998, we were just starting to use email. Fax was as high-tech as it got. I am afraid we are still using Lotus Notes, something the House should look at and scrutinise much more carefully. As I said, there was one staff member Deputies could rely on and that staff member had to fulfil a range of different roles.

That secretarial assistant role has evolved dramatically over the past 20 years or so. The pressures placed on secretarial assistants now are enormous compared with the moderate kind of pressure I experienced in my day-to-day work as a secretarial assistant back in the late 1990s. The job description alone is a complete anachronism. It conjures up images of someone who takes dictation, writes letters, works nine to five Monday to Friday and that is the end of it. They are much more than that. They are the essential cogs and keep a Deputy's service going.

Often, they are the first person a constituent speaks to when they phone or call into an office. Their work is far from being merely clerical or administrative. They are an advocate and an expert in getting things done, as we know. They are real experts on public administration, entitlements, services and so on. However, for some time they have been treated extremely shabbily. The ironic thing is they are being treated very shabbily by those of us who really should know better. Their rates of pay, their conditions and the basic levels of workplace respect and dignity afforded to our colleagues, the secretarial assistants, bears little relationship to the real value they bring to their job and to the service they provide to the people who elect us.

It shames these Houses that this work and those who do it so expertly are taken for granted. I think they have been taken for granted by the system. It is almost as if the system has decided there is a premium for working in politics. So many people want to work in politics and get that experience that they seem to be required to take a hit for the first few years of their career and hope they get a better paid job as a parliamentary assistant or as an adviser, or that job in the political party might come along. That is part of the thinking and part of the culture. It is wrong and needs to change.

Having served as a Senator in recent years I have seen how the role has changed. The role of secretarial assistant for a Senator is very different from that of a secretarial assistant for a Deputy. There is a world of difference and a fair system needs to be devised take account of that difference in the context of the resources to be allocated under the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission Bill we are discussing this evening.

My union, SIPTU, has been actively engaged on this issue in recent years. I pay tribute to my Labour Party colleagues, Chloe Manahan and Ellen Murphy, who have worked tirelessly as union representatives to try to resolve this issue and to advance this just cause. Other representatives who work with all political parties are engaged in this process. A pay claim was lodged in 2018 when I was a Senator. That was designed to compress the secretarial assistant scale for Dáil staff and to introduce a parliamentary-assistant-related scale for Seanad secretarial assistants. A derisory offer was made to secretarial assistants in recent times and I can entirely understand why that was rejected.

I am not a negotiator and I am always conscious we make remarks in this Chamber in the context of a negotiation that is ongoing. This is not me instructing anybody what to do but we need to get real and set appropriate pay scales for secretarial assistants. We need to be much more transparent on that. Rather than the existing 18-point pay scale could secretarial assistants not be moved to a much more appropriate scale like, for example, the executive officer, higher scale that would start at €34,000 and move up to about €56,000 with fewer increments along the way? It takes 18 increments for a secretarial assistant to get to the top of their scale. Given the rates of pay at the moment, it is most unlikely any secretarial assistant will be in position long enough to be able to get to the top of the scale; why would they?

While I understand the Minister cannot engage in industrial relations negotiations, which would be inappropriate, I appeal to him to send a political signal here this evening that he supports the work our secretarial assistants do. I know he does, but I would like him to make a political intervention and appeal for this to be resolved in the best interests of the secretarial assistants who work so hard with us, who represent our operations so well and are much more than the description "secretarial assistant" could ever really define.

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