Photo credit: Houses of the Oireachtas
There are, perhaps, few better jobs in Ireland than being a member of Seanad Eireann. It’s true, of course, that the salary (basic pay of €69,474) is not quite at the level of a TD (basic pay of €98,113), but that ignores quite a few other advantages.
For example, that basic pay can be topped up with a travel allowance worth up to €30,000 annually depending on how far from Leinster House you live. The scale of that payment, of course, is very Senator friendly: So long as you manage to find an address that’s 25km away from Leinster House, you get €22,000 extra per year.
You get free parking in Leinster House for life. You get €750 towards the cost of a new phone, every 18 months.
And, perhaps best of all, the Seanad generally only sits two days per week.
As “family friendly” jobs go, you won’t find many better than being a member of Ireland’s Seanad.
Which was why a member of the Seanad called Gript yesterday evening, to express considerable frustration that the sitting days for the upper chamber are being re-jigged to make the place even more family friendly.
Previously, the Seanad had been sitting, during the pandemic, on Mondays and Fridays. Indeed, it is sitting as we speak, this morning, for the last time on a Friday for the foreseeable future.
From Monday, the Seanad will sit on Mondays and Tuesdays, to accommodate two members with small children.
“It’s ridiculous”, our correspondent noted. “Monday we’re sitting in the Dáil, Tuesday they’re throwing us down into the Convention centre. Why we can’t get back into the Seanad, nobody knows”
“Since January, we have been doing Mondays and Fridays. Now we have to do Mondays and Tuesdays, simply because two people don’t want to have to travel to the Seanad twice in the one week. And these people are claiming thirty thousand a year in expenses to come to work”
Indeed, a quick look at the Seanad schedule confirms the story: Having sat Mondays and Fridays every week since January, the schedule for next week now has the upper chamber meeting on Monday, and about half a day’s worth of business scheduled for Tuesday.
“The committees are all done by zoom, at the moment, which is great for people”, our source said, “because they don’t have to come into work if they don’t have to”.
Is this a huge story? Well, we’re probably not going to win a Pullitzer, here, at Gript, but it does have some significance, because it highlights how lockdown has actually made life for a lot of politicians much easier: Much less time at work, committees by zoom, and now a schedule designed to make life as easy as possible. When lockdown ends, of course, they’ll have to go back to a normal schedule.
You might imagine that some of them aren’t that keen.