Bid to include TDs' €41,000 assistants in jobs freeze fails
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SITTING Dail deputies can continue to recruit €41,000-a-year assistants despite the public sector recruitment freeze.
The Irish Independent has learned that the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission insisted the special secretarial allowance for TDs would not be trimmed in the current economic crisis.
Proposals to extend the Government's public sector recruitment embargo to the secretarial allowance were scuppered by the commission which is headed by embattled Ceann Comhairle John O'Donoghue.
Under the scheme, TDs can engage a parliamentary assistant to help them with the duties of public office.
They can enlist a person to do the work and pay them a salary of €41,092 -- or they can use the money to source help from an outside secretarial service.
The final bill for all 166 TDs is estimated to be at around €6.8m a year.
The assistants are not civil servants, but they are paid for by the public purse, which is facing a major black hole as a result of the current downturn.
While they will not be hit by the hiring freeze, thousands of other workers who applied for jobs in the public sector will.
The sweeping embargo will mean the loss of up to 3,000 jobs a year across the entire public service through natural wastage -- meaning the non-replacement of workers who retire or leave.
Needed
However, Oireachtas Commission members insisted that the TDs assistant scheme was needed.
"The commission was advised that the Government moratorium applies to public sector posts only and does not apply to the staff employed by members and parties under the Commission's Scheme for Secretarial Assistance," the minutes of a commission meeting said.
"The commission discussed the possibility of applying the principles of the moratorium to the scheme but concluded that this was not practical given the nature of the scheme and the fact that staff employed under the scheme are assigned to individual members and therefore work for that member only."
Last night, Labour TD Joe Costello, who is currently recruiting for a part-time parliamentary assistant, insisted every TD should be allowed to avail of one.
He pointed out that his previous assistant had gone on a career break and he has been without someone for over two months.
"An assistant is there to research legislation, policy and debates. Every TD needs a parliamentary assistant," the Dublin politician said.
"It is unfair that one TD out of the 166 would face a moratorium on recruitment when trying to find a replacement for an assistant who has gone away.
"It would be another matter if the Government were to look at staffing for TDs on an overall basis."
Fine Gael said it has no plans for further recruitment but it insisted assistants should be provided for TDs.
Army
"Parliamentary assistants are one small support that opposition TDs have in their work as against the army of civil servants at the disposal of the Government," a spokeswoman said.
A Fianna Fail spokeswoman said the government party were happy to follow the directions of the committee and she pointed out that the recruitment of office staff was an issue for individual TDs.
A spokesman for the Department of Finance pointed out that once a TD was not re-elected the assistant ceased to be employed.
- Patricia McDonagh
