Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State is very welcome to the House. He will be aware that I have spoken on issues relating to my electorate, county councillors, for many years.I am delighted to see some of them present in the Public Gallery having travelled all the way from Donegal over the mica issue. It is something we have to take on board. It is not for the good of their health that these people travelled for three and a half hours to get down here and will spend the same amount of time travelling back home.

Today, however, I wish to raise the issue of the ambiguity that exists in the gratuity of county councillors. The situation is clear if a county councillor served as such from 2020 to 2023, 2024 or whenever the next election will be. Such councillors know exactly what are their entitlements. For councillors who served on both a town council and a county council, where a dual mandate was held, again, the situation is clear and they know exactly what are their entitlements. Their entitlements are four twentieths, or one fifth, of the representational payment. I have always had a difficulty with the title "representational payment" because, as the Minister of State will know, we have representational payments here in the Oireachtas and they are an entirely different thing from what is given to county councillors. It should be called a salary but that is an argument for another day.

The ambiguity arises where a member of a local authority was a member of a town council for ten years, let us say. We lost all the town councils in 2014. That is a decision the Minister of State might revise and reconsider because many towns are dying due to the lack of a town council. We have finished up in a situation where there is a lack of certainty in respect of the entitlement for a person who had a single mandate on a town council and subsequently went on to a county council and finished in 2024 or 2023. I want to put certainty in place and I hope the Minister of State can assist me in that regard.

First and foremost, there is ambiguity with regard to the representational payment. Is it the current one or the previous one? In the public service, we always deal with the current, so the gratuity should be based on the representational payment of €25,000-odd that is there today and there should be no ambiguity whatsoever in that regard. The issue of taxation is an individual one and I will not get into it. Those who were both a county or city councillor and a town councillor know they will be given the county councillor's rate of gratuity. It is the other group in which I am most interested, and I hope the Minister of State can shed light on that issue today.