Dáil watchdog seeks answers on €81k hike

THE Department of Public Expenditure has been given ten days to respond to 14 questions about the controversial €81,000 pay hike for a top civil servant job.

The Dáil’s powerful spending watchdog is seeking clarity on pay rise for next head of the Department of Health and the reassignment of Robert Watt to that department.

The Coalition landed itself in hot water when it approved the move by Mr Watt, former secretary general of the Department of Public Expenditure, to the Department of Health on an interim basis.

The Government agreed to a salary increase for the next secretary general of the Health Department to €292,000. Should Mr Watt be appointed permanently, his own annual wage will rise by €81,000.

The letter from the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee, seen by the Irish Daily Mail, asks how the competition for the full-time job as head of the Health Department can be ‘open and transparent’ when Mr Watt has already been appointed on an interim basis. The Top-Level Appointments Committee (TLAC) will stop accepting applications for the role on January 28.

After this point, the PAC wants to know how many applicants there were for the role.

The TLAC, of which Mr Watt is a former member, also featured strongly in the letter. The PAC requests to know whether any meetings regarding the appointment took place and details on who attended them, what the agenda was, if the salary increase was mentioned at these meetings, as well as minutes of all meetings that may have taken place.

Details on any engagements Mr Watt and/or the Public Expenditure Department had with the

TLAC were also requested by the PAC. In the Dáil yesterday, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar was asked – by Sinn Féin’s public expenditure spokeswoman, Mairéad Farrell – who in Government approved the pay increase.

‘As is the case with any salary of this nature, the decision on it was made by the Minister for Public Expenditure [Michael McGrath], but he made that decision with the full knowledge and agreement of the three party leaders in Government,’ said Mr Varadkar.

The Fine Gael leader had previously told reporters that the Cabinet had ‘signed off’ on the pay raise; however, this was later contradicted by Higher Education Minister Simon Harris, who said ‘no memo’ had been brought to Cabinet on it.

A spokesman for Taoiseach Micheál Martin said that it was a ‘Government decision’.

The PAC has asked what section, body or official of the Public Expenditure Department approved the increased remuneration and whether any member of Government was informed of the salary boost and when.

Vice-chair of the PAC and Social Democrats co-leader Catherine Murphy expressed concerns over the precedent that the wage increase will set.

The Tánaiste has even admitted that he has ‘no doubt’ that requests for wage increases will be made by civil servants because of the controversial raise.

The PAC has followed this line of questioning and asked under what circumstances there can be a deviation from the civil service pay scale. The €292,000 sum is €81,000 more than the highest rate of pay available to civil servants.

It comes as Fianna Fáil TD Marc MacSharry, who is also a PAC member, submitted a parliamentary question to the Taoiseach asking if the pay raise was ‘constitutional’.

He also asked whether his party leader would bring a ‘message’ on the ‘exorbitant’ wage increase to the Dáil for approval.

‘No memo’ brought to Cabinet