Catherine Noone (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and those in the Gallery to the House. I commend the Minister for his work to date. It must be said that he is the first Minister to make some positive change for councillors, which has to be welcomed. I welcome broadly the measures that have been brought in already. All of us who are in regular contact with councillors are aware of their immense dedication and workload. The reality of councillors' day-to-day lives is that they are on public duty full time and available to all citizens in their areas day and night. One of my colleagues said earlier that if one were to break down the hourly rate, they would be well below the minimum wage.

Since the reform of local government structures in 2013 there have been positive changes, but there is no disputing the significant increase in the workload of elected members arising from new structures and legislative obligations. I will elaborate on these later. While I have said I welcome these positive moves and I do not want to be overly critical, the most pressing issue is one of equality for all councillors. That must be addressed as a matter of priority. While I welcome the €1,000 increase, it is not fair, as other speakers have said, that it has not been extended to councillors in Cork, Galway and four Dublin authorities. That is a total of 232 councillors. Like their county council counterparts, they do a tireless job. However, they are excluded from the municipal districts members' allowance of €1,000.Inequality, especially when it comes to this positive change, is hard to take for the councillors in question. To give an example, among the councillors present in the Public Gallery, we have Councillor Geoghegan from Waterford, Councillor Cronnelly from Galway and Councillor Ward from Dublin, only one of whom will not receive the additional allowance despite doing largely the same job. This is unfair and hard to take, especially for local authority members in Dublin, Galway and Cork.

Another glaring example of inequality is that local authority members are one of the only groups who cannot present a medical certificate to explain absences from work or meetings in their case. While it is fair enough to require members to attend more than 80% of meetings to receive allowances, there are instances when people cannot attend meetings for reasons of illness, bereavement, maternity or paternity reasons. I ask the Minister to address this issue because it could be easily changed. If a councillor is unavailable for work due to illness, bereavement or, most glaringly, maternity reasons, he or she should be allowed to present some form of presentation to excuse an absence.

As previous speakers noted, the substantial increase in the workload of councillors has been exacerbated by the reduction in the number of councillors from 1,627 to 949. Many councillors are faced with much larger electoral areas, for example, in west Mayo, west Clare and south-west Kerry, and must provide a service for areas that take a four-hour round trip to cover. It must also be remembered that councillors in city areas are serving areas with growing populations.

I welcome the positive changes in respect of PRSI and the efforts being made by the Minister who is the first Minister to face up to this issue. The longer term objective for Senators must be to seek an increase in and realignment of councillors' representational payment to bring it to a realistic level, perhaps to one third of the salary of a Senator, as Senator Wilson stated. This would reward them for their hard work and commitment. As previous speakers noted, there is a danger that we will lose great people. While campaigning in the recent Seanad election, I met councillors who asked what they were doing with their lives and why they were working so hard for so little remuneration.