Review of top-level pay

I believe TD’s parliamentary assistants havn’t been affected by the 10% reduction for new entrants, granted its for a fixed term, nor do they appear to be subject to the civil service pension levy even though their employment is pensionable. Starting salary of 41k euro is also questionable especially when similiar jobs in the UK hoover in the mid 20s. There also seems to be a trend to hire postgrads, but even then I think its overpaid for the job that they do.

@Kevin O’Rourke.

You are absolutely right. The lower paid PS should dig their heels in now.
How else can you respond to this level of greed.

It looks like the present course to ruin must run its course. Only a catharsis can correct it.

When I previously worked in a government department, stories about internal promotions (and associated pay rises) in the D/Finance over the past year or so were pretty commonplace. I doubt there is hard evidence to support these claims, however these stories about A/Sec or PO’s feathering their own nests are devastating for morale at lower levels whether true or not.

D/Finance is about to preside over savage cutbacks in front line public services and is administering a crude employment/contract renewal embargo across the rest of the public service which essentially lops off the easiest (and lower paid) targets. It is remarkable that ‘senior’ officials can display such breath-taking arrogance in insulating themselves from pay cuts – their justification is presumably all the hard work they are now having to do to clean up the mess they helped create in the first place.

Nearly 4 years into our economic collapse and these people still do not get that closing the budget deficit requires a general perception of fairness.

Our policymakers would be well served to read Jens Henriksson’s 10 lessons about budget consolidation in the aftermath of the Swedish banking crisis (Bruegel) – Lesson 5: ‘Consolidation should be designed as a package …the idea is to signal that you are not partisan and that the budget deficit is a general problem that everyone should participate in solving’

Alas, policy elites are more interesting in setting up a new ‘senior public service’ whatever that means without the backbone to show leadership on basic issues such as administering pay cuts with a degree of proportionality.

This failure to appreciate the signalling benefits of administering ‘reform/consolidation’ in packages also applies to other areas such as combining reform of wage-setting mechanisms in lower paid sectors with genuine efforts to rein in the excesses of e.g. legal and medical professions.

The policy mistakes keep on coming because the people at the top refuse to accept any accountability for their performance. Surely now is the time to change the pernicious culture of jobs for life for the insiders?

@Mark Dowling – “given the incumbent is not running for re-election surely now is the time for a pay review?”

I daresay that there are people out there who would feel proud to do that job for free.

“The Minister acknowledged that there might be contractual issues in relation to the application of any cap to current incumbents.”

If there is then pay them in IOUs instead of Euros borrowed on a maximum debt service basis, from “official funders”.

Having gone through the economic arguments about the extent or not to which it might be a mistake to go a non-Keynesian route for countries that have lost access to private sector funding, maybe it might be an idea to focus some more attention now onto the damage that a piecemeal – weakest-first / protected and connected last – route to Ireland’s deflation will do to its long run economic potential.

That might be more useful to the country and harder for the establishment to rebuff than just pointing out that some people are “getting away with” this or that. The man in the street in Ireland just shrugs his shoulders because he expects them to. Providing objective reasoned arguments as to why the national economic interest is being damaged might be more effective.

You can’t benchmark these guys. Who’d do it? Who’d be independent enough? How would you stop meddling from senior figures protecting their own salaries.

Forget benchmarking, you just need someone to look at the size and value of the economy, and give a cap on maximum public salaries, everything else can follow.

Take the last higher remuneration report, instead of pointing out anyone was overpaid it found that if you added in a unexplained, undocumented adjustment factor (no FOI allowed of course) for cost of living and taxes they were paid about right – compared to wealthy and better run countries at least. (A conclusion implied from that report was that senior Irish public servants needed a compensating pay rise every time taxes rose.)

They got in the same people who’d done the original higher remuneration reports, who possibly had an interest in explaining why their earlier reports weren’t bogus. I strongly suspect given a chance they’d be the ones picked again for another “benchmarking”.

It is always “contractual” or “legal” problems when it comes to the Politicians and the Elite Civil and Public Service. Where is this coming from only the Attorney General and the D of F who are the Elite?

Is there a Politician around with Balls to deal with this self serving cabal?Everyone above Assistant Principal Officer level in the D of F and Central Bank/Financial Regulator should have been given their P45 after the mess this lot have lorded over for the past 4 years and their total lack of oversight of Regulators during the previous 10 years. Any Private Sector business would have booted them out long ago instead we get leg ups for persons into higher positions who previously were in charge of the mad house. Incompetence pays in Ireland !!!!!

Rory, I imagine yes, but not under the heading “private”.

What passes for meritocracy at some private sector banks is a bit of a joke though.

Spose a JLC for this element of the upper-echelon is out of the question? Then again, they don’t do Sundays, do they?

@joseph ryan

i don’t think the lack of comments is a lack of interest, more a case of “what can i say?”

I’m incoherent with rage and disbelief!!!!!!!!!!!!!