IN preparation for their 30 per cent (£10,000) pay claim last May, our TDs engaged the services of the consultancy firm Unbicon at a cost of £10,000.
It is not unusual for people making a pay claim, especially one as extravagant as that made by the TDs, to engage economic consultancy assistance. It is unique for those making a pay claim to charge to their employees (in this case the taxpayers) the cost of their submission. This is precisely what the TDs arranged.
The TDs couldn't lose and the taxpayers couldn't win. Either the TDs got their huge wage hike, in which case they won and the taxpayers lost; or they failed to get a huge wage hike, in which case the TDs neither win nor lose but the taxpayer has to foot the consultancy bill. Very neat.
And to add insult to effrontery, the TDs now refuse to divulge the Unbicon report upon which their claim for a £10,000 per year claim was based. The taxpayers are not allowed sight of the report for which they have to foot the bill and they are not allowed to know the basis upon which this massive pay demand was made on them.
There is a very strong case for the contention that TDs are already paid too much, rather than paid too little.
If TDs earn a multiple of the average income in society (the average income is about £15,000 and TDs at present earn £34,706) how is it possible for them to represent the interests of the average person, let alone the interests of those who have to live on incomes below the average?
At their present rate of pay, TDs represent an elite. However in touch they may claim to be with their constituents, it is simply not possible for them to know the privations and hardships of the average person, since they themselves are part of a wealth aristocracy. (Yes, people even on incomes of over £30,000 resent their inclusion in the wealth bracket but that, in reality, is what they are relative to the majority in Irish society.)
The Unbicon report, we are told on a briefing basis, states: "A TD requires the ability to be a legislator, a strategist, a community champion, a welfare officer, a mediator and an excellent communicator." (If this is a clue to the calibre of the report both the TDs and the taxpayers have got bad value for the £10,000.)
A TD has only two constitutional duties: to act as a legislator and to hold the executive (government) accountable for its actions to the Dail. (That latter constitutional function is, apparently, ignored by Unbicon, as it is by the majority of TDs, who also ignore the first constitutional duty.
If a TD chooses to act as "a strategist (whatever that is in the context), a community champion (whatever that is in any context), a welfare officer (we already pay for lots of these) and an excellent communicator (a communicator of what?)", that is his/her own choice. Invariably, such extra-curricula functions are done to the detriment of the two constitutional functions - indeed the two constitutional functions are not addressed at all by the majority of TDs.
They will protest that the Dail procedures do not permit them to act as legislators, for the executive arm of government has taken over the legislative function as well. Well if this is so (and manifestly it is so), who has permitted it to be so, but the TDs? And if the majority of TDs spend almost no time in holding the executive accountable to the Dail, again who is to blame for that?
TDs based their claim for a £10,000 annual wage increase on the number of hours they say they work and on the perceived necessity to offer salaries sufficient to attract people of calibre into politics.
TDs claim to work between 70 and 81 hours per week. If it is true that on average they work such hours it is their own doing. The hours are self- determined and they are expended on being "a strategist, a community champion, a welfare officer, a mediator and an excellent communicator". It is bad enough that TDs are diverted from their real functions, without demanding to be (over) paid for their diversions.
As for the necessity to offer attractive salaries to encourage people of ability to come into politics: is our political system not already chock-a-block with people of calibre, who, apparently, are undeterred by the salary level? Anyway, what evidence is there that anybody who would be any good in politics is deterred by the salary level from entering it?
WHILE politicians are paid far more than the average in society, the political system will be biased against the interests of the average and the worse off. As has been argued in this column repeatedly, the political system is already hugely biased in favour of the rich because of the private financing of that system.
But this is not to argue that the infrastructure that surrounds TDs and the political system itself should not be financed generously by the taxpayer. TDs need research and legislative back-up to perform their constitutional roles and they should get that.
There is a case for employing a few research assistants to work with each TD, as well as providing adequate office and secretarial back-up. There is also a compelling case for the taxpayer to fund entirely the political system - apart from the equity this would advance, it would relieve TDs and parties of the burden of fund-raising.
There may also be a case for changing the electoral system drastically in a manner that would relieve TDs of the kind of constituency pressures they currently encounter. The favoured single-seat arrangement would not suffice, and, anyway, it would render the Dail less representative than it is at present.
A preferable arrangement would be a list system of election, whereby a large proportion of TDs would be elected on a national constituency basis. This would both reduce the localised pressures on those TDs and open possibilities for greater representativity for "minorities" e.g. women, environmentalists, travellers. Options for a new electoral system are outlined in papers by TCD political scientists Michael Laver and Michael Gallagher, published in the appendices to the report of the Constitutional Review Group.
In April 1992 the Review Body on Higher Remuneration in the Public Service commented upon "the absence of a standard definition of an elected representative's job". Now, five years on, there remains an absence of a standard definition: it is still not clear, apparently, what TDs are supposed to be about.
In this forthcoming election, candidates for election should be asked: "What do you think the role of a TD is and what qualifications do you have for the position?" Since the election is likely to be about nothing at all, at least we might get this clear and it might serve as some basis for choosing between candidates who otherwise all stand for the same thing.