We must scrap the secretarial assistant's pay scale and pay our SAs properly. I could not do this job without the secretarial staff. It has been nothing other than regressive for secretarial assistants.
The reality of the role of a secretarial assistant has evolved significantly over the last five to ten years and there is a dichotomy between the functions, roles and responsibilities of a secretarial assistant working with a Senator and those of a secretarial assistant working with a Deputy. As someone who lives in Galway city where the rents are so high, I know that it is an absolute struggle for my own secretarial assistant and no doubt for other secretarial assistants in that constituency and in similar areas.
Key terms by TF-IDF across 3,644 words from 8 speakers. The summary quotes the highest-scoring sentences verbatim — nothing is paraphrased.
Tellers: Tá, Deputies Thomas Pringle and Róisín Shortall; Níl, Deputies Jack Chambers and Brendan Griffin.
| Question | Result | Tá–Níl |
|---|---|---|
| Amendment put: | Lost | 46–69 |
| Amendment put: | Lost | 45–64 |
| Amendment put: | Lost | 44–66 |
| Amendment put: | Lost | 46–67 |
| Amendment put: | Lost | 47–64 |
| Amendment put: | Lost | 46–65 |
| Question put: | Carried | 68–42 |
| Amendment put: | Lost | 47–63 |
| Amendment put: | Lost | 48–60 |
Party shown is the one each member held on 2021-12-02, frozen by a dated join — not their party today. The Oireachtas API publishes no date of birth and returns an empty gender field for every member in this period, so no age or gender breakdown is shown.