David Cullinane (Sinn Fein)

I did not lecture the Minister about his salary or that of anybody else. I made the point about costs and whether this measure would reduce costs. We are not advocating that TDs, Ministers or Senators should earn the average industrial wage. That is a decision that those of us in our party make and we invest the money in our constituencies. What we propose are modest decreases in the pay of politicians, and that is linked to the section because the Government is creating an impression that this is about cutting costs. With the greatest respect to the Minister, in the general scheme of things having seven or eight fewer TDs is not cutting costs.

The Minister talks about comparisons in terms of the salaries TDs, Senators and Ministers earn but he should put those comparisons in the context of the European Union. For example, the Government is quick to act when it comes to the joint labour committees, JLCs, and low income earners. It says people are overpaid and that it should be looked at in comparable terms yet our politicians are paid much more than our counterparts in Britain, France, Germany and the United States. Those are serious issues.

This is not about lecturing anybody. It is about stating the facts. This measure is window dressing. If the Minister wants to cut costs there are various allowances available to people in this House that are ridiculous. This is not about class or whether people from working class backgrounds will be able to get elected to these Houses. There are allowances for chairpersons, vice-chairpersons and Whips. Those allowances were put in place in a different era. That was money stuffed into the political system by Mr. Bertie Ahern when he was Taoiseach. He gave any amount of money to politicians. We had benchmarking and so on, and politicians more than benefited form benchmarking. That is the reality. I do not see how those kind of payments can be made in the current climate. That is the point I was making. That is not lecturing the Minister or anybody else. If the Minister is aware of what Sinn Féin proposes, and Fine Gael and the Labour Party are very good at misquoting and misrepresenting Sinn Féin's position, and if he had listened to what Deputy Pearse Doherty proposed in the Dáil recently in respect of a Bill we brought forward he would be aware it was a 15% decease in the salaries for TDs and Senators and 30% for Ministers to bring us in line with the European Union. What we do in Sinn Féin in terms of the average industrial wage is a matter for my party. It is our business, not the Minister's business.