The Government is to face demands by hospital consultants and senior civil servants for an immediate pay review in the wake of its decision to breach its own pay guidelines for the new chief executive of the health service.
Prof Aidan Halligan, the current deputy chief medical officer in the UK, who will become head of the Health Service Executive in Ireland next April, will be paid around €330,000 per year in addition to a 20 per cent bonus.
This is more than €100,000 per year higher than the salary of the Taoiseach, the Chief Justice or the Secretary General of the Department of Finance.
However it is believed to be in line with pay scales for the chief executives of some commercial semi-State bodies.
Following revelations of Prof Halligan's pay package last week, senior civil servants and hospital consultants are to demand that the Government reassess its decision to postpone their next pay review until 2007.
The pay of top civil servants, judges and the chief executives of State agencies is assessed by the Committee on Higher Remuneration in the Public Service.
The last review, which resulted in average pay increases of around 12 per cent, was completed in 2000. However last June the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, announced that the next pay review was to be put back until 2007.
The Irish Hospital Consultants Association said yesterday its members believed the decision to defer the pay review was "totally unacceptable" and this issue would be discussed at its annual conference at the beginning of next month. The IHCA secretary general, Mr Finbarr Fitzpatrick, told The Irish Times that the pay package offered to Prof Halligan "had not gone unnoticed".
The Association of Assistant Secretaries, which represents senior civil servants, has also called on the Government to initiate the pay review immediately.
The association told the Sunday Tribune yesterday the fact that the Government had had to offer a "commercial package" to Prof Halligan indicated that senior public servants were underpaid relative to what they could earn in the private sector.
Internal Government documents published earlier this year showed that the Department of Finance wanted to set Prof Halligan's salary within the existing range paid to senior officials - between €162,000 and €208,000.
