McDaid and Hanafin should try living in a real republic sometime
Poor Máire Geoghegan-Quinn found herself in the political grinder over the past week due to her two pensions – a ministerial pension of €62,945 and a TD’s pension of €44,380. She was receiving pensions totalling €107,325 on top of her current EU Commissioner’s salary of €243,918.
She and other politicians have been collecting pensions while still working as public representatives. Is there any other job where people can draw a pension without actually quitting the job? This was untenable. In fairness, Máire spared us the usual political prattle. She did not try to defend the indefensible. She simply declined to comment on her pensions. “That’s a question that I’ve refused to comment on up to now and I will continue to refuse to comment on it,” she said.
Over a year ago Brian Lenihan tried to do away with the ministerial pensions for sitting members of the Oireachtas, but the rug was pulled from under him.
“Fairness must be the cornerstone of all our efforts to achieve economic renewal,” he said on introducing the emergency budget in April 2009. “Those who have most must give most. However, before we ask anyone else to give, we in this House and in the Government must examine our own costs. We must lead by example.”
Lenihan announced that the ministerial pensions being paid to members of the Oireachtas were being discontinued. But he had to back off that decision following advice from the Attorney General who reportedly said the pension was a property right that was essentially protected by the constitution. He therefore advised the minister to consult with pension recipients.
The Department of Finance wrote asking each member of the Oireachtas receiving a ministerial pension to suggest an appropriate amount by which their pensions should be cut. After six weeks, only 16 of the 31 sitting members involved had bothered to reply. The Government eventually decided to cut the ministerial pensions of serving members by 25% and to discontinue those pensions after the dissolution of the current Dáil.
If the Oireachtas has the authority to cut the pensions immediately by 25%, and to abolish the practice before the start of the next Dáil, surely it could have cut them by 99%, and nobody would care too much one way or another about the other 1%.
The Government could have introduced legislation abolishing the pension for serving members and recommended that the President refer it to the Supreme Court in order to get a prompt ruling on its constitutionality.
If necessary, there could then be a constitutional referendum. It would have had the easiest passage since the referendum abolishing “the special position” of the Catholic Church, which was carried in every constituency in the country in 1972.
The glaring inequity of those political pensions is obvious to all but the most selfish, grasping politicians. Various ministers – Dermot Ahern, Mary Hanafin, Micheál Martin, Brian Lenihan, John Gormley and Eamon Ryan – called on Geoghegan-Quinn to give up her pension.
In the midst of the public outrage, she duly asked for her pensions to be suspended for the duration of her term as European Commissioner.
But the Taoiseach showed no leadership in the matter. While celebrating the 1916 Rising last Sunday, he essentially stated that he could do nothing about it, even though it is a gross aberration of true republicanism. Politicians have been treating themselves as peers with privileges denied to other citizens. In the process Cowen showed he knows no more about true republicanism than he knew about finance in his last job, or leadership in his current position.
Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny and Labour leader Eamon Gilmore announced they would sponsor legislation ending the pension entitlements of serving politicians once and for all. Eighteen of the 21 active politicians who were still in receipt of such pensions have announced they will surrender them, leaving just three Fianna Fáil holdouts – MEP Pat “Cope” Gallagher and TDs Jim McDaid and Noel Treacy.
“There has been a type of witch-hunt against TDs and their salaries and what they earn,” McDaid complained. “I think it doesn’t augur well for the benefit of democracy into the future, if we are not going to be able to pay TDs a reasonable salary.”
The controversy isn’t about salaries. It is about the pensions he and others were getting on top of their salaries, while other citizens are expected to quit their jobs before collecting a pension.
McDaid blamed the media, but the media has only been highlighting what people in the streets are saying, and what Brian Lenihan advocated over a year ago. Poor Jim is paid €98,424 in salary and he is insisting on the top-up with his pension of €22,487. During 2008 he asked 13 questions in the Dáil. Those totalled 458 words, which amounts to little over one-third of this column. I wonder if Deputy McDaid would tell us if he made any verbal contribution at all in the Dáil during 2009? If he did, it was not registering in electronic search.
Of course, unlike the many people who have lost their jobs due to the Government’s extravagance in recent years, Deputy McDaid does not really need the money. “Thankfully,” he said, “I’m not in a situation where I’m dependent on the money but at the end of the day it’s a matter of principle.”
LISTENING to him talking about this as a matter of principle is like listening to some of his party colleagues talking about ethics. They seem to think Ethics is a county in England.
After calling for Geoghegan-Quinn to surrender her pension, Mary Hanafin refused “to get into this any further” when she was asked about McDaid’s pension. But then Ms Hanafin is the recipient of another gross inequity as a former teacher turned politician. Her teaching job is not only kept open for her while she is in the Oireachtas, but she also enjoys pension rights as if she were still teaching.
Currently her teaching pension is estimated to be worth €415,800 in actuarial terms, and this would translate into a teaching pension of about €30,000, in addition to the Oireachtas pension of €60,000. Even if she has been paying into the teacher’s pension, this is handsomely underwritten by the State for the teachers. Her Oireachtas pensions are already massively unwritten by the State, and the teaching pension should not be underwritten while she is not teaching.
The state can no longer afford this kind of extravagance. Our so-called leaders should demonstrate leadership, for a change. Legislation should be drafted to deal with the pensions issue in a fair way that reflects broad republican principles. True republican leadership requires that politicians and other public servants should be entitled to a pension on the same basis as other citizens of the Republic, with no special privileges attached.
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