There were sharp exchanges in the Dáil between Minister for Social Protection Leo Varadkar and Sinn Féin deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald in a row over the restoration of TDs’ salaries.
Ms McDonald criticised as unfair the €5,400 repayment to TDs of the pay cuts imposed in the wake of the economic crash.
Sinn Féin will on Thursday publish a Bill to prevent TDs receiving the restoration increments of €2,700 for each of the next two years.
But the Minister said politicians should not be deciding politicians’ pay and their salaries were pegged in 2000 to the pay of principal officers in the public service.
Ms McDonald said it was unjust when Ministers had a take home salary of more than €150,000 and TDs received €87,258, that social welfare recipients were getting an increase of just €5 while young unemployed were receiving only an extra €2.70 a week.
Ms McDonald referred to the restoration of pay to TDs and Ministers as increases.
But Mr Varadkar said there were no pay increases and had not been since 2008. He said the Taoiseach had taken a wage cut of 40 per cent, ministers a cut of 35 per cent and ministers of state a reduction of 25 per cent.
None of them would be taking pay restoration.
But Mr Varadkar said “I’m interested to hear you lecture me” when Sinn Féin was in office in Northern Ireland “where you tell unemployed people that they’re worth less than £100 a week”.
He said: “Don’t pretend to me that you’re not somehow in charge of that. You weren’t willing to make decisions on social welfare.”
“Sinn Féin voted to transfer the powers back to London for a period so that the British could make decisions for them.”
“So that’s what sovereignty” and fiscal responsibility meant to Ms McDonald’s party, he said.
The Sinn Féin deputy leader replied that the Minister should “talk to the Tory party about social welfare” and about partition.
She claimed it was “brass, iron neck” that there would be an “increase” in politicians’ generous salaries and she questioned whether the public was getting value for the payment to each TD and Minister.
Rounding on the Dublin Central TD, Mr Varadkar said: “Sinn Féin is terrified of the facts and they really hate the truth being exposed in this chamber.”
Mr Varadkar said Sinn Féin TDs “claim they only withdraw the industrial wage”.
He asked why the salaries of Sinn Féin special advisers in the North were not released when they were published in this State and he questioned why “Sinn Féin MPs claimed money from the British exchequer for jobs they never did” in apparent reference to the refusal of the party’s MPs to sit at Westminster.
