Robbie Gallagher (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. This is the first opportunity I have had to congratulate him on his promotion and wish him well in his new role.

I refer to the new travel-mileage expenses rate which took effect for all public servants on 1 April this year. The new rate was negotiated by the Civil Service unions with the Department of Finance. It had the added dimension of the Haddington Road agreement in which the unions and employers came up with a new rate and method of calculating mileage expenses incurred by public servants. Across the public service those most acutely affected are members of State boards and county councillors.I was disappointed to learn from those bodies that no consultation took place on this issue with the representative bodies, either the Local Authority Members Association, LAMA, or the Association of Irish Local Government, AILG.

The new rate for travel expenses differs from the old one in that there are four different categories as opposed to two heretofore. One significant effect of the new rates is that for the first 1,500 km a year that a claimant might travel, the rate drops from 0.6088 per kilometre down to 0.4479 per kilometre which results on a return journey in a drop of approximately 26%.

In practical terms, as I stated earlier, those most affected by this will be local authority members who would struggle to get up to 1,500 km through any group they might form part of, whether that be an education and training board, ETB, or a health fora. Members of the north-east health forum who would travel to a meeting in Kells would leave Monaghan town, for example, at 12 o'clock for a meeting at 2 p.m. and would not be back home again until 6 p.m. - that is six hours. Many of them will find it difficult to afford to be able to go to that type of meeting, which is disappointing bearing in mind that it is important, for example, on a health forum, that we have community voices heard. This makes it more difficult.

I suppose a disappointing aspect of it as well is that when one considers this along with other cuts that local authority members have experienced in recent times, it makes the role of the county councillor that more difficult. Indeed, in my own constituency, Cavan-Monaghan, in the past couple of weeks we had two councillors resign purely because they are holding down full-time jobs and were finding it impossible to manage the two.

It would be difficult to get a single arrangement with Revenue and whoever for county councillors on this issue, but I would ask if that could be looked at. More importantly, we need to look at the issue of terms and conditions for local authority members in the round, and this will form part of it. We need to make it more attractive for local authority members to carry on and not resign because we depend on them to be the voice of the community in the future.