MINISTER FOR Finance Brian Lenihan will tonight defend his controversial reversal of pay cuts for some 600 high-earning public servants to Fianna Fáil TDs and Senators, many of whom have been openly critical of the decision.
Mr Lenihan will address the parliamentary party meeting tonight and explain the rationale for the decision. In the budget he announced that public servants at the assistant secretary and deputy secretary levels – and equivalent grades throughout the public service – would be subject to pay cuts of between 8 per cent and 12 per cent, depending on salary.
However, in a circular issued in Mr Lenihan’s name immediately prior to Christmas, the reductions were reduced to between 3 per cent and 5.5 per cent. Mr Lenihan argued he had varied the reductions because employees at that level had already forfeited bonus payments in February 2009, which were worth an average of 10 per cent of salary.
The reverse gave rise to a prolonged and heated debate at last week’s meeting of Fianna Fáil TDs and Senators, with at least 15 speakers condemning the decision on the grounds that it was a change that discriminated against low-paid public service workers.
Mr Lenihan was not present at last week’s meeting. A motion subsequently tabled for tonight’s meeting by two deputies, Michael Kennedy from Dublin North and Mattie McGrath from Tipperary South, has called on the Minister to explain the decision.
Yesterday, Mr McGrath said that there were two aspects of the decision that needed to be clarified. He said the first was the unfair notion that a bonus could be considered an intrinsic part of a salary.
The second was the revelation that the reverse would benefit some 600 senior public servants. He said that the Minister, in an RTÉ interview last month, had suggested that only 160 or so would be affected when it was now apparent that senior officials working for county councils, the HSE, other State agencies such as the DPP’s office, the State Solicitor’s office, universities, as well as the Garda Síochána and the Defence Forces, would also benefit.
Senior sources said last night that it was very unlikely that Mr Lenihan would revisit the decision, although he may accept, in principle, the basis of some of the arguments made by his Fianna Fáil colleagues against the decision.
The levels of deputy secretary and assistant secretary cover senior positions in Government departments and also equivalent grades across the wider public service.
For example, the grades include senior ambassadors, the chair of the Competition Authority, the chair of the Labour Court and the chair of the Refugee Appeals Commission.
Others who fall within this bracket include the chief executive of the National Council for Special Education, the Data Protection Commissioner and senior Garda and Army personnel.