Social Welfare Bill passed as pay at top of semi-State bodies criticised

MINISTER FOR Social and Family Affairs Mary Hanafin has described as “outrageous” the salaries paid to chief executives of some semi-State bodies.

Ms Hanafin said “it is outrageous for the head of a body, such as Coillte or the ESB, to receive a salary of €400,000 or more”.

“I trust they will have taken some leadership as well, in the same way . . . let me put this on the record . . . as those of us in the House, the Taoiseach and Ministers . . . we are very well paid and I recognise as much.”

The 15 per cent cut in ministerial salaries was “formal, legal and permanent”, she said.

She was responding to Sinn Féin’s Martin Ferris, who criticised the “huge salaries of CEOs such as Prof Brendan Drumm, while we take €8 per week off somebody who is living on €208’’.

Ms Hanafin was speaking during the debate on the controversial Social Welfare Bill, which implements cuts of some €762 million and which the Government passed by a comfortable margin.

After a tumultuous two-day debate, with repeated heckling, interruptions and trading of insults, the Government won an electronic vote on the legislation by 80 to 74.

Labour Party whip Emmet Stagg said the legislation had been “bulldozed” through the House and demanded a walk-through vote which the Government also won, this time by 81 to 75.

But during sharp exchanges it emerged that a “poverty-proofing” assessment of the social welfare cuts, usually published with the Budget statement, has not yet been finalised. Labour spokeswoman Róisín Shortall pointed out that every year since 1998 the poverty-proofing was done when the Budget went to Cabinet.

Ms Hanafin said the Combat Poverty Agency had always published the document within a few days of the Budget and this was now being done within the department and would be published within a few days.

Earlier there was an extended row about the guillotining of the legislation.

Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny described the Government’s behaviour as “contemptuous” and he wanted “every member of my party to be able to speak out on this Social Welfare Bill”.

Labour leader Eamon Gilmore said the guillotine was being used to serve the Government’s political needs. “They want to get Deputy Healy-Rae and Deputy Lowry, Deputy Grealish, Deputy McDaid and the two strays from Sligo to come in here and to vote before they go back to their constituencies,” he said.

Sinn Féin Dáil leader Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin said the reality was that “this Government might as well rule by decree from Government Buildings”.

Then Jackie Healy-Rae, who rarely intervenes in debates, said: “All I have to say is a very simple message to Deputy Gilmore and Lady Shortall that if Labour was short of people like myself and Michael Lowry to make up the numbers in this House, they’d be damned glad to have us.”