THE 30 per cent pay claim by TDs had been rejected by the Review Body on Higher Remuneration in the Public Sector.
The Irish Times has confirmed that the Review Body has recommended a 3 per cent increase for Dail deputies in a report recently submitted to the Minister for Finance, Mr Quinn.
Government sources stated last night that the Minister was still studying the report. It is understood that the finding has not yet been submitted to the Cabinet.
The Review Body, which is the independent group which determines pay rises for members of the Oireachtas, received a submission from an all party Dail subcommittee last May seeking a30 per cent pay increase for deputies, the equivalent of an increase of £10,000 a year. The claim was prepared by the sub committee on Members' Entitlements of the Dail Committee on Procedure and Privileges.
The sub committee consisted of Mr Brian Fitzgerald (Labour), Mr Noel Treacy (Fianna Fail) Mr Jim Mitchell (Fine Gael), Mr Bobby Molloy (Progressive Democrats) and Ms Kathleen Lynch (Democratic Left).
The all party group engaged a consultancy firm, Inbucon, to prepare their submission to the Review Body, which is chaired by Mr Michael Buckley, former secretary of the Department of Social Welfare and currently managing director of AIB Capital Markets.
With their claim based on the findings of a questionnaire sent to all deputies, the all party submission maintained that a TD's basic salary of £33,354 was equivalent to £9.05 per hour. It said that deputies worked 70 hours a week; when the Dail was in recess, and 81 hours a week when it was sitting.
"Since 1991", the TDs stated, "the workload has increased significantly. The number of committees has more than doubled and the frequency of meetings has increased substantially."
They acknowledged that Oireachtas members received a "significant pay rise in 1992", when the Gleeson Review Body recommended increases ranging; from over 17 per cent for Ministers to 3.8 per cent for TDs. But, they stated in their recent claim, these pay increases were inadequate. "In 1992, a TD's salary was equivalent to that of a principal officer (higher) in the Civil Service. Now, it is equivalent to that of an assistant principal officer (higher)", their submission said.
The final recommendation of the consultants' report was for basic pay of £43,000 to £45,090, based on an analysis of the duties, responsibilities and conditions of employment in Dail Eireann and comparative investigations of eight European parliaments.
The rejection will cause embarrassment to deputies at a time, they say, when their public standing is at its lowest ebb.
