Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for coming in today to directly hear about this. I understand that as Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, he is extremely busy dealing with the substantial increase in spending across all Departments. I think he can hear where people are coming from and see that we are passionate advocates on behalf of our secretarial assistants.

I do not want to go over all the points that other Senators have made and spoken at length on. However, Senator Higgins importantly outlined why our secretarial assistants are essentially parliamentary assistants. I want to focus on giving the Minister and others a real idea of the salary that first-time secretarial assistants have. As my secretarial assistant is going on maternity leave, today I sent off the information on salaries to somebody who might be interested in coming in and taking over during that time. When you are outlining to somebody the pay grade they will be on and what they will be required to do, it is quite embarrassing to have to say that the salary is €468.06 per week. It is difficult to get sanction for people to come in directly on any scale above that. If you are looking for housing in Dublin, there are just three places available on Daft.ie that would be considered affordable for somebody on that salary. Given that an affordable rent for someone on that salary would be about €600 per month, there are just three places available. The lowest rent for one-bedroom rental property in Dublin on Daft.ie is €1,291. I am focusing on Dublin because most of the secretarial assistants are in Dublin, given that the Seanad sits in Dublin. I remind the House that some people are single and not everybody has a second income coming in. This week, we saw that the average deposit for a house is €52,000. If you are earning €468 a week, it will be very difficult for you to save much money when you are paying €1,800 in rent. If you are very careful and you put away €100 a month, it will take you 43 years to be able to save up for the average deposit on a house. There was a time when people were able to buy houses for 3.5 times their salary. Now, the average deposit is twice a salary. The deposit, which is 10% of the price of a house, is twice the salary a secretarial assistant gets.

Arguments have been made, which I do not understand, around the contagion effects that this would have on other lower-paid civil servants. These are the only public servants in this country who have not had a pay rise since 2000. Even though these public servants are extremely low paid, when you open up a newspaper you see reports suggesting that in the course of Covid-19, all of them were paid overtime when they were at home. I can tell the Minister that my secretarial assistant was working late last night at home for me. Therefore, yes, they were doing overtime.Imagine getting such low wages and then having to open up the newspaper and see people giving out about you on Twitter because people were paid overtime over the course of the pandemic. Even last week, I saw that people wanted their names released. I thought about that and I am really glad about the decision the Houses of the Oireachtas Service made.