Lowering of public service pay to be proposed in report

A “SIGNIFICANT lowering” of salaries for the highest earning employees in the public sector, including Taoiseach Brian Cowen and his Cabinet colleagues, will be recommended in a report to Government within the next 10 days

Government Chief Whip Pat Carey last night said the Review Body on Higher Remuneration will submit its latest report in the next week to 10 days. "I think it is likely to recommend significant lowering of salaries in that sector," Mr Carey said on RTÉ's The Week in Politicsprogramme.

The last report by the review body was in October 2007. It recommended at that time significant pay increases for many of the 1,600 most senior staff in the public service, including politicians, the judiciary, gardaí, heads of government departments and State agencies, including the HSE and the ESB.

It also recommended a €38,000 increase (14 per cent) in the salary of then taoiseach Bertie Ahern from September 2008 to bring it to €310,000, higher than the salaries of most European leaders and of the US president. While the judiciary and others received the awards, Mr Ahern announced a deferment for politicians for one year.

When Brian Cowen became Taoiseach in May 2008, he said that he and other Ministers would decline the increases awarded. Mr Cowen’s salary has since fallen to €232,572 after a voluntary cut of 10 per cent and the pension levies have been applied.

Mr Carey would give no indication as to the level of reduction the body will recommend. But he said that it should provide a template for pay negotiations across the public service. “I think if that is the case we should seriously look at a proportionate reduction in wages right across the broader public sector, and I include this organisation and universities and others,” he said.

He said the Government had committed itself to finding an additional €4 billion in savings in the budget. “Now it would be preferable that it could be worked out by agreement. But the bottom line is that everything including pay has got to be looked at.”

Speaking on the same programme, the former president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Senator Joe O’Toole, said he believed an agreement could be reached between unions and Government over pay, using the social partnership model.

“We’ve done it in harder times in 1987; we can do it again. This country could do it, but it has to be done in a professional way, in an honest way with integrity, where for instance Nama has to have a social element to it.

“We have to protect people at the lower level,” he said.