GREEN Party leader John Gormley has criticised the salaries paid to top RTE stars, describing them as being "completely out of touch with the reality of ordinary people's lives".

While Gormley said he did not look in detail at the individual figures, he said "some of them" were getting the equivalent of four ministers' salaries, clearly a reference to the €950,000 salary earned by Pat Kenny last year.

"I don't believe the scale of the responsibility the individuals have and the hours that are worked merit that type of money," he said.

The environment minister said he did not want to single out any RTE stars. He agreed that pay at the top of public life generally had got out of hand. It was "only right and proper" that ministerial and senior civil service pay be brought down to a level that is "commensurate with best international practice".

"We have to look at everybody right now, be it people in RTE, ministers and across the board. Otherwise we, as a country, just won't get out of this because there is always that relativity there, when people say 'how can that be justified?', when the finger can be pointed. When you're asking the nurse or whoever it is, as we did last year, to take cuts, that's not easy and it has to be justifiable," he said.

In an interview with the Sunday Tribune, Gormley also accused the opposition of engaging in "political stunts" on the Nama legislation, with "threats to flood the committee room" rather than looking at the issues.

"I think the opposition now needs to come forward with real amendments to improve the legislation," he said.

He also said he had no doubt that if Fine Gael and Labour were in government, they would be introducing a "version of Nama".

The Green leader rejected suggestions that his party was now irrevocably tied to the government after the renegotiation of the programme for government.

"It's never regardless. There is no open-ended deal. There never has been and never will be," he said, adding that the party's view was that "as long as our policies are being implemented, we're part of this government".

Gormley said the forthcoming budget would be "very difficult" but insisted that it was "the only medicine", adding: "We're still not out of the woods, but we now know what we have to do". Given that the state is now borrowing €400m a week, involving huge interest repayments, savings would have to be made in every single department, he said.

Commenting on the planning legislation that he is currently bringing through the Oireachtas, the minister said that by the end of his tenure there would be a better planning system, with more sustainable and responsible development and an end to the type of car-dependent ribbon development common in the past.

Noting that there are 418,000 septic tanks in Ireland – "many of them not working" – compared to just 80,000 in Scotland which has a bigger population, Gormley said: "We have a problem here... We have to ensure that we get this right and we just can't continue to build in this irresponsible way. My idea is that we would have proper planning as you have in other countries".

Describing the current crisis as the "ultimate Green opportunity", Gormley quoted US ecological economist Herman Daly, saying the future was "not about capitalism or socialism but resource-ism".