Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore has said there should be a review of the method of determining pay in the public sector.
On RTÉ's This Weekprogramme yesterday, Mr Gilmore also said there should be a public debate on pay levels and the value placed on different jobs.
The secretary general of Impact, the country's largest public sector union, also said it was important that the Government as well as unions realised that there was a real challenge ahead in dealing with the fallout from the benchmarking report.
Peter McLoone said that based on the reaction of unions to the report, which awarded no increases to most public servants, there had been damage caused to the benchmarking process for determining public sector pay.
He said the decision of the benchmarking body to change the methodology for comparing public and private sector jobs, and to introduce a higher premium to take account of public-sector pensions, was fuelling anger among members.
Mr Gilmore said there was a fundamental flaw and unfairness in a system that resulted in people in high-paid jobs getting large increases while those in lower-paid posts got nothing.
He said that "people in chief executive-type jobs are getting megabucks". The Labour Party had established through a parliamentary question that there were 1.5 million people earning less than €38,000, the level of increase awarded to the Taoiseach under the recent top-level pay review, he said.
"What has now happened in our economy is that there are people at one end of the scale who are paid enormous sums of money while there are people at the other end who are on very modest levels of pay and who have to cope on those modest levels and have to pay for everything," he said.
Mr Gilmore called for a public debate on pay and the values of different jobs.
He highlighted the report last week that the VHI was seeking Government approval for a €650,000 salary for its next chief executive. He said the pay level being sought by the VHI was about 10 times the amount paid to a director of nursing in hospitals.
Mr Gilmore said he did not dispute that people had to be paid at different levels for different responsibilities.
However there were huge gaps between the "mega levels of pay" at the top and the earnings of other groups.
"What needs to happen is a public debate about levels of pay and the value of different types of work," he said.
He also said that there was a need to have a look again at the method of determining pay in the public sector.
Mr Gilmore said one of the problems was that a lot of the pay determination and negotiation was done in private. The benchmarking process had been "very secretive" and that the basis for its conclusions was not really known.
Mr McLoone said that unions did not consider the benchmarking process to be a "money-making machine". He said the memorable remark by former teachers leader Senator Joe O'Toole equating benchmarking to an ATM would "haunt him until the day he goes to his grave". He said that Mr O'Toole had been trying to entice his own membership into the process.
"There are real challenges facing Government and ourselves in how we deal with public service pay issues," Mr McLoone added, "how we ensure there is a continuation of peace and stability and how we ensure that the modernisation and change project, which are very necessary to improve our public services, are not thrown off course."