A SENIOR public servant who wishes to remain anonymous has taken a voluntary pay cut of more than 50 per cent, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin has revealed.
“We have moved remarkably, but we cannot look on public servants as an amorphous group to be squeezed to solve all our problems,” said Mr Howlin.
“We have an agreement, namely the Croke Park agreement, under which we are bringing about objectively significant and radical reforms.”
It would take time for those reforms to be bedded down, he said. “If we want them to be embraced and not resisted by working to rule and strikes, we need a two-sided agreement.”
He said the Government had stated it would not cut pay further as long as there was full engagement with the radical reform agenda, redeployment and other measures.
Independent TD Stephen Donnelly said the Government believed that in order to reduce the pay bill significantly, “we are going to fire, retire or downsize”.
Regardless of the mechanism used, there would be fewer workers. “What we will not do is pay less,” said Mr Donnelly.
“At a time when we are trying to keep people off the Live Register it seems to be a strange absolutist commitment not to touch wages.”
Mr Howlin said there had been a pay reduction of 9 per cent at clerical officer level; a teacher had experienced a reduction of 12 per cent; a staff nurse, 10.5 per cent; a garda, 11 per cent; a middle ranking civil servant, 12.5 per cent.
There had been a cut of more than 30 per cent in some instances in top-level pay. “Those reductions are on top of the levies paid and everything else,” he said. “One should not dismiss the pain the public sector has endured.”
Mr Donnelly said that when the Dáil’s technical group met the troika last week, it was told many of those looking for a debt write-down for Ireland were some of the best-paid civil servants in Europe.
Mr Howlin said that when the current Government was formed, he believed that the highest levels of the public service were paid too much.
“That is why, in our first act, we set a new pay ceiling for the Taoiseach, Ministers, Ministers of State, which was significantly lower than the remuneration of our predecessors,” he added.
A couple of years ago, a secretary general in his department would have been earning €285,000, but he was now receiving €200,000.
Mr Howlin said Ireland was finding great difficulty in recruiting medical consultants.
“If our pay rates were so generous in comparison to the UK, there would be a queue out the door, but there is not,” he added.
But he did agree they were paid too much and that more transparency was required.
“All this is a work in progress, and if the deputy looks objectively at what we have achieved in 12 months, he will see that we have radically transformed the platform in which more progress can be made,” he added.
