Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

My questions are on two tranches of pending legislation. The Taoiseach will be familiar with the landmark High Court judgment earlier today in the case against NAMA and Anglo Irish Bank taken by the Office of the Commissioner for Environmental Information. This was instigated by a request from Gavin Sheridan, who has been a leading light advocating for transparency in the State for many years. The court ruled that NAMA and Anglo Irish Bank were public bodies and therefore subject to environmental information regulation. Will the Taoiseach inform us when the freedom of information Bill will be before the House? Will it deal comprehensively with access to information from NAMA and the former IBRC and Anglo Irish Bank? NAMA and the Office of the Commissioner for Environmental Information are both public bodies that have been fighting this out in the court. It has been going on for three years now. It is such a complete abuse of public money that there should be a direction or order on the Minister asking him not to appeal it and waste any more money belonging to the State.

Yesterday, the Government published the agreement on how it would take money from low and middle-income public sector workers following a couple of weeks of negotiations. It has been a year and a half since the Government started discussing taking money from higher bank executives - those on €500,000-plus in pay and pensions - but we have not seen the report yet. It is glaringly obvious that although the Government can introduce cuts to the basic salaries of 300,000 public sector workers within a couple of weeks, one and a half years on the salaries of those people who creamed it at the top and who were responsible for the damage to the economy are maintained. We have not seen the Mercer report yet. When will it be published? Given the announcement made by the Government yesterday, it is important that it is published without delay and that action is taken on these vast salaries and pensions.

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