Unions have expressed surprise at the Minister for Finance's comments yesterday that he would support a redundancy package being offered to civil and public servants.
During a debate on a Fine Gael private members' motion criticising the Government's record on the economy last night, Mr Lenihan said he would like to see a proposed redundancy scheme for staff at the Health Service Executive applied to the rest of the public service, and said the Government was determined to secure "maximum value for money in our public services".
Niall Shanahan of Impact said there was suprise at the remark and pointed out there was no guarantee redundancies would lead to cost savings.
"There's no immediate guarantee that it would deliver the cost savings they are looking for, particualrly as you would be looking at a big outlay when the Government is trying to save money," said Mr Shanahan.
He said he was unsure how serious the proposals were, but cautioned against rushing any sort of redundancy programme through without proper consideration.
"What we have is what looks like an off the cuff remark during private members' time. We don't see any proposals," he said. "Maybe this is something that will be presented as part of the Budget. I suspect that if it is it will have suffered from not having had much time put into working out any kind of detail on this sort of progamme."
Mr Shanahan warned that cutting jobs would lead to a loss of services.
"If you get rid of jobs out of the system,=in order to save money, it equates to cutting services. There's a direct link between the two," he said.
He said a recent OECD report commissioned by the Government had found Ireland's public sector relative to our population and economy was relatively small compared to other OECD countries such as America.
"So not alone do we have a public sector that the OECD has found not to be excessive in size, but if you arbitraily cut jobs from it or exercise some sort of voluntary redundancy programme, if you lose jobs out of the system, you lose services as well."
