Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased to be able to talk about this important Bill, which covers the entire running of this House. I would like to address two things. The pay scales of the secretarial assistants go from €24,223 to €46,888. There is a difference of something like €16,500 between their pay scale and that of parliamentary assistants at the bottom of the scale. After 18 years, the gap is closed but that is a very long time to have served as secretarial assistant. As the Minister knows, this is precarious employment because many secretarial assistants only last in the job as long as we last. As we have seen in the recent election, the turnover in this House is quite dramatic.

I would make a general point. I believe the gap between the low paid in the public service and the top paid has widened in real terms since the 1960s, and that has been retrograde in society.

The work of our secretarial assistants is not the same as the work of somebody working in a big office as a clerical officer. Our secretarial assistants have unique features. They are doing a public-facing job. They have a major work burden. Then need to multitask and know about many schemes in the public domain at any one time. When they are working in the constituency office and we are up here, they are virtually working on their own on their own self-initiative. They cannot ring the Member about everything.

A job analysis of what they do would find they are atypical workers with very unusual work conditions and, as I said, their work is quite precarious because it only lasts as long as the people who are elected last. That issue needs to be addressed urgently. I am not sure how the mechanisms work. Ultimately, the Minister must provide the money. He needs to give a clear signal that if money is awarded, it will be there and will be paid. The Oireachtas, as a collective, needs to look at the issue of people like this who are so crucial to the operation of democracy in this country.

A second matter has not yet been addressed by anybody here. It is a parallel question as to whether we are resourcing ourselves properly to do the work the public wants us to do and whether we respect democracy enough to believe our work is vital and we must be resourced to do it properly. There has been mention of years as far back as 1998 but I first came to these Houses as a Senator in 1989. We had one secretarial assistant in those days between three Senators but the world was so different. There were no emails and everything came by post, so everybody had to complete an onerous task of typing or writing a letter. There were virtually no mobile phones and although there was an odd brick-type phone, constituents did not have them in their pockets. They did not expect instant contact and there was very little media to be done in those days.

The procedures of this House were totally different, as was the amount of paperwork. The complications from consultations were different, as was the amount of research we must do. The roles then and now are worlds apart. People have spoken about the change between 1920 and 1950 but the changes in the 30 years since 1989 have been just as dramatic when analysed. We must go with such changes to do justice to the job. We did not have pre-legislative scrutiny at the time or all the committees in which we now spend so much time preparing reports and doing detailed work etc.

It amuses me at times to look at what the public thinks we have and what we really have. I often have people contacting me and asking that I have a member of staff look at the diary before reverting. My staff are so crazily busy that the staff member dealing with the diary is me. If I do not do it, my staff must do it and if that happens, they cannot be doing something else for me. It is a question of how the labour is divided. The reality is we have two staff who are entitled to holidays and breaks. They sometimes get sick and so on. The idea that we have a bevy of staff, with one for the diary, one for constituency work and one preparing us for Parliament is not true. We all know it is not that way but we are shy or afraid of saying it because certain sections of the media might not like it. Such sections of the media purposefully do not want to understand the importance of democracy. We must be fearless and do something about it.

This always reminds me of something that happened many years ago when a lady rang my constituency office to complain that I was effectively getting paid to get re-elected; in other words, that the people working in my constituency office were helping me to be re-elected. I noticed the number was from Dublin because in those days people rang on landlines. I rang her back, and she was giving out about my constituency office. I said, "By the way, you rang my constituency office." She said, "Yes", and I said, "You did expect the phone to be answered even though you weren't even in my constituency." She said, "Yes", and then she suddenly realised that she had put her two feet in it and she started laughing.

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