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Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú: Maybe we have not made the point that the 35-year allowance is effectively a long-service increment for teachers that is called an allowance.
Deputy Paschal Donohoe:   It would really help us get a grip on the big picture if Mr. Ó Foghlú could update those two tables in the way we discussed.
From the big picture, I want to go to micro issues and go back to a theme explored by Deputy Harris. He lightly touched on the table entitled Department of Education, details of allowances paid in the university sector, which Mr. Burke also raised. I will wait until that page comes up on screen. Can Mr. Ó Foghlú see it?
Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú: Yes, we have it.
Deputy Paschal Donohoe: I am referring to row 47 of that table - Mr. Ó Foghlú might be on the wrong document. This is the Excel spreadsheet he sent to us. It is the submission to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. It relates to the university sector. Row 47 relates to tutor payments to people working in universities. A tutor role is pretty frequent within our third-level establishments. Why can the existing academic pay grades and salary scales not accommodate a post as common as the tutor post within our colleges?
Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú: This is unique to Trinity College Dublin whose tutors have traditionally been academic staff who provide pastoral support and advice for undergraduates and postgraduates. The payment will cease from July 2013 in line with current contracts.
Deputy Paschal Donohoe: Let me see if I can get another example. Out of all the rows on the sheet, I had to pick that particular one. I will tread more carefully.
Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú: Quite a few of the allowances will cease in a number of years or when the current holder concludes.
Deputy Paschal Donohoe: Let me try again. Is the head of department allowance going?
Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú: What number is that?
Deputy Paschal Donohoe: It is on row 30 in the same document.
Mr. Philip Crosby: Normally, we would expect the head of a university department to be somebody at professor level. If somebody is not at that level, for example, if he or she is a lecturer or senior lecturer who acts up and takes on a head of department role, the allowance would be paid in that case. Effectively, they are taking on higher duties in the professorial space so they would be paid an allowance for that.
Deputy Paschal Donohoe: I assume that analysis would apply to many of the allowances shown. Why do we not just put them on to the professorial scale?
Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú: It is a rolling three to five-year appointment so they get the allowance for the period of time during which they are heading up the department and then they move back to their ordinary pay after that.
Deputy Paschal Donohoe: If they went on to the salary scale for professor, would the Department be precluded from doing that?
Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú: Yes.
Deputy Paschal Donohoe: The Department could not put somebody on a salary scale when he or she was a professor and take him or her off when he or she stopped being one? I want to tease this out.
Mr. Philip Crosby: The other issue is that the salary entitlement is pensionable but in this case, the allowance is not, so it saves on future pension bills.
Mr. Pat Burke: It is not unlike a Civil Service Department or anywhere else when somebody steps up for a period of time. Rather than promote them substantively which effectively locks them in, one gives them what is called an acting-up allowance for the period in question.
Deputy Paschal Donohoe: I was going to ask that question. Before I do, let us look at row 65 of that document where we have the kango money allowance. This goes to the heart of the difficulty we face, which is that one has an approach that covers a head of department allowance and then under the same "allowance" heading, one finds the kango money allowance. Three people within the education sector are in receipt of that allowance. Do we still need allowances like this?
Mr. Philip Crosby: Tool allowances remain quite common for general operative grades across local government, health and education. Again, those are three individuals in a particular university. The university has probably christened it a kango hammer allowance because that is what they are doing but it is a variant on the tool allowance concept that is still widely used.
Deputy Paschal Donohoe: If we were to draw a curve of the number of people in receipt of an allowance and the cash value of the allowance - perhaps we should do this as part of our report - we would find the high value allowances which lots of people are drawing and then it would tail off and leave a very long tail of lots of allowances that only a few people claim, like many of those here. That long tail is where much of the difficulty lies. It creates a perception among taxpayers and those who comment on this that a very large amount of allowances are being claimed. However, they are being claimed by very few people. Is there not an alternative way of tackling something like, for example, the kango money allowance?
Mr. Pat Burke: The better way is that instead of having differentiated kango hammer and power drill allowances, one would have a greater grouping of allowances and, by definition, less of them. That is something that might be more understandable to the public. I see the Deputy's point that there is a difficulty with the public perception of some of this. Probably the biggest element and what accounts for the vast bulk of the money is allowances that are very proximate to core pay. If the preponderance of a grade are all drawing a certain type of allowance, the reality is that for that grade, because that allowance pretty much obtains for everyone, it is about getting as close to core pay as possible.
Deputy Paschal Donohoe: That is why I spent the majority of my time trying to tease out matters. If we were to assume that a principal's allowance is not really an allowance, which is the point made by Mr. Burke and which I accept, and we stripped that out from our analysis, we would see a situation where the vast majority of the allowances, given that the degree allowance will change, will be received by people who are not at the top of the teaching apex. They are not principals, assistant principals and so on. They are either in the classroom or doing additional duties within third-level colleges. It is not just a question of perception. One concern I would have is that where there is a kango or dirty money allowance, it could create the feeling that if I do something else, I am entitled to an allowance for it, for example, if I wielded another kind of hammer. I do not want to feed into the cliché of this debate. I am just using it as an example to make the point.
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