Average weekly earnings in the public sector, excluding health, rose by 3.1 per cent in the year to December 2006.
According to statistics released by the Central Statistics Office today, a total of 249,800 people were employed in the public sector (excluding health) in December last year, as opposed to 248,000 in December 2005.
Overall employment in the public sector increased by 6,100 to 356,100 in the year from December 2005 to December 2006.
In the three year period from December 2003 to December 2006 the number of gardai increased from 12,000 to 12,900.
The number of primary school teachers increased from 31,700 to 35,000, while the number of secondary school teachers rose from 18,800 to 20,000 in the same period.
Employment in the semi-state sector fell by 4,300 between December 2005 and December 2006, due in part to the effects of the privatisation of Aerlingus.
Weekly earnings in the public sector rose in the year from December 2005 to December 2006.
Since December 2003, the average weekly wage of a member of the Garda Siochana has risen from €974.87 to €1,286.01.
The average weekly wage of a secondary school teacher rose from €844.87 in 2003 to €1,00.91 in the three years between December 2003 and 2006. The weekly wage of a primary school teacher has risen by €146.18 per week in the same period.
Responding to the CSO figures the IMPACT trade union said pay was now rising almost twice as fast in comparable parts of the private sector than in public services.
IMPACT's Information Officer, Bernard Harbor, said that comparing average public sector pay with average industrial earnings was misleading.
"The CSO figures for average industrial pay are not a study of the entire private sector. Rather, they describe a limited sample of manufacturing jobs," he said.
"The public sector pay bill includes a very wide range of professions from the top to the bottom of public service organisations where staff are more qualified and more likely to be professionals, technicians or managers. It is deliberately misleading to say that public sector pay is 40 per cent ahead of comparable workers in the private sector, or anything like that," he continued.