Sir, - I refer to your news story of last Saturday (October 12th) under the heading: "Pensions for ex Presidents, Ministers and officials cost nearly £3m." Your story goes on to detail the pensions payments in 1995, as extracted from the Finance Accounts Report, and I am included as having received pension payments of £27,066.
I do not have any pension arising from my ministerial service. I do not qualify for one, as I do not have the required three years' minimum service.
The figures quoted from the Department of Finance Accounts in my case (and of others) relate to severance monies paid in 1995 arising from the fall of the last Government. This scheme of severance pay is as follows 75 per cent for the first six months, 50 per cent of salary for the next 12 months, and 25 per cent of salary for the next six months.
Thus mathematical readers will be able to calculate that my severance ceases this December and that I am currently on 25 per cent of former ministerial salary. The Department of Finance Accounts for 1995, from which your report is drawn, apparently makes no distinction between pensions of former office holders, such as Jack Lynch, Liam Cosgrave, Charles Haughey, and mere minions such as myself who are in receipt of these very temporary severance arrangements.
I would have thought that the meticulous Department of Finance would, at the very least, have differentiated between these categories and supplied separate lists. There is an ocean of difference between a pension which is permanent and has costs into the future, and a deceasing severance arrangements which ceases after two years. In fact, there is no connection at all between the two concepts.
As someone who has been persistently critical of the confused and outdated presentation format of the National Accounts, I suppose that I should not have been surprised. If the Department of Finance can get so confused in this relatively simple and straightforward area of public administration, I quake at how it hopes to handle EMU. - Yours, etc.,
(FF) Frontbench Spokesperson on Finance,
Dail Eireann.