Guess Which Government Department Is Raising Its Pay Bill By 93.6%?
Wednesday 15th October 2014
They say the devil is in the detail. So ISME has spent the night carefully reading the 224 pages containing the ‘Comprehensive Expenditure Report 2015 – 2017’ issued by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform as part of Budget 2015. Did we just write ‘reform’? What an abuse of the word ‘reform’ when applied to Brendan Howlin’s department.
We draw your honour’s attention to page 151, headlined Exchequer Pay Bill – Net. This is a comprehensive list of the changes in the pay bill per each department. Allowing for the additional number of public servants that were sanctioned yesterday (Teachers and Gardaí in the main) the figures are mind boggling. We needn’t remind the court that the country is running on empty despite the hoopla around yesterday’s ‘easing’. That means, if you were running the country like a business and not as a re-election bus, that you wouldn’t have money to increase your spend on wages. Period.
In order of appearance we see that the party bus driver himself, an Taoiseach, is raising the pay bill at his department by 11.1%; The Central Statistics Office by 14.6%; The Public Appointments Service by 19%; Shared Services don’t even make it to the top slot of rises with a mere 23.2% rise in pay while the absolute winner is the Office of Public Procurement (part of Minister Howlin’s depart – he obviously doesn’t do irony) has raised its pay bill by a staggering 93.6%.
The overall increase in the coming year’s pay bill is fractionally short of €290 million – for just one year. Just imagine if that €290 million was put to work as working capital for SMEs in the productive sector. Why aren’t the unions jumping up and down to have public monies used for productive purposes so that people can get back to work? We calculate you could get more than 1,500 quality social houses for that kind of money. So could it be that it’s public sector union members that benefits from these massive pay bill increases and frankly as far as they’re concerned the unemployed can wait their turn (to put it politely)?
The Department of Reform my…
