Every day you hear about something that has to be delayed or cancelled because of the pandemic.
Now we have dire warnings about the cost of all the emergency measures adopted to deal with the crisis: increases in taxes, increases in unemployment, redundancies, pay cuts.
Pay cuts: there’s a thing. That’s something no one at Stormont has ever heard about. Delays? Cancellations? No, they don’t apply either in the self absorbed, self-indulgent, self-important alternative world assembly members inhabit. They couldn’t implement all sorts of important arrangements agreed in that unintentionally ironically titled New Decade New Approach document because of Covid-19, but you’d better be sure they could find time and energy and sheer effrontery to push through what are universally regarded as astoundingly deplorable increases in their expenses and the salaries and conditions of their staff.
They set aside (trashed in other words) determinations enforced by the Independent Financial Review Panel (IFRP) in 2016 and, in the shape of the Assembly Commission, voted themselves as sole arbiters of the distribution of largesse among themselves and their staff. Lest you forget, the IFRP was established in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal at Westminster when people here found that, as in Westminster, not only did many MLAs have their snouts in the trough but some had developed creative troughs of their own.
Alex Maskey, chair of the Assembly Commission, pronounced the single greatest piece of nonsense in the whole controversy when he wrote in June that a proposed new body’s "sole remit" will be “independently determining the salaries and pensions of assembly members”. Horse laughs. Irish News photographers snapped a herd of pigs flying over the members’ car park at Stormont. No one said to Maskey, “but you are the assembly members so you can’t be independent.”
Now they have increased their own expenses and salaries of their staff exponentially – a new word they learned from the R number in the pandemic. Forty per cent increase for office spending and 60 per cent extra for staff salaries. Maskey, ever humorous, said this would "enable MLAs to carry out their legislative and constituency responsibilities in an appropriate, efficient and flexible way". Yeah right. If their past record is anything to go by, and perhaps the reason they want to return to the past, the emphasis will be on “flexible”. Alan McQuillan, a former member of the IFRP, said that expenses covering staff employment, office accommodation and travelling were a “honeypot”.
He expressed concern that some MLAs would inevitably return to the abuses of the past. MLAs were condemned and derided for employing unqualified close relatives and friends at public expense, for paying exorbitant rents for office accommodation which were really gifts to friends or relations whereas other MLAs were paying the market rate or even spending their own money.
The reasoning MLAs have provided for deciding to pay some of their staff more than junior doctors or teachers is simply insulting. They say they should not be on less favourable terms than assembly staff. However assembly staff are civil servants and they have to have qualifications. Civil servants also have to apply in open competition with a track record. MLAs’ staff don’t have to have any qualifications so semi-literate relatives can and will continue to be employed, but now at eye-popping salaries with cushy pensions and six month sickness leave on full pay.
MLAs offered teachers a 4.25 per cent rise and resisted any substantial rise for other public sector workers. Now they’re handing out some unprecedented and incomparable rises which amount to 50 per cent backdated to April. It’s disgraceful, disgusting, appalling and that was the unanimous verdict from the public in radio phone-ins last week.
The IFRP tried to invoke some respect for the concept of integrity and ethics in public life in its 2016 report. As far as some of the denizens of Stormont are concerned they would put a fiver each way on ‘Ethics’ if it was running tomorrow.
