For the €3.6billion in extra pay for our civil servants, will we get even one extra garda?
CONTRARY to Government spin about this month’s pay package debuting the generous provisions of the October Budget, I can’t say I’ve noticed a significant difference to the bottom line.
If I read my pay slip correctly, I will be roughly €50 better off per month compared to last year although the unfortunate reality is that like most people in the country, I’ll be quite a bit poorer with rising grocery prices, health insurance and energy costs swallowing up more of my income.
Yet while I won’t be cracking open the champagne about my take home pay, there is one group of workers in the country who have lots to celebrate, and who will face 2024 in better financial shape with a very nice cushion indeed against inflation.
Public servants are set for pay rises worth 10.25% due to the newly hammered out €3.6billion wage agreement.
The deal includes a backdated pay rise for all 385,000 of our dedicated servants of 2.25% or €1,125 whichever is greater on January 1, a pay rise of 1% on June 1, 2024, and a further pay rise of 1% or €500 whichever is greater on October 1 this year. Next year 2025 and the following 2026 sees a series of similar increments. Good times.
Now if the upshot of this largesse was to entice more Garda recruits into the training college in Templemore, or to persuade more nurses, teachers and health workers to stay in the country rather than flee in droves, then the cost to the taxpayer would be justified. For why do we pay taxes if not to provide a decent health service, safe streets and properly staffed schools?
Yet the likelihood is that the extra cash won’t make any dent in the staffing crisis that envelops our essential professions.
Collective bargaining in the public service means that everyone from gardaí, teachers and nurses to local authority workers, the defence forces and civil servants gets a hike regardless of whether they are jobsworths who spend their days jealously guarding their fiefdoms against potential usurpers and fighting turf wars or workhorses who tirelessly implement reforms and deliver policies and earn every cent of their keep.
Collective wage agreements also mean that the State’s hands can be tied when it comes to targeting certain professions for the special measures which are arguably needed now with the crisis in health and shortage of gardaí.
According to the figures, the average wage for public servants is €57,000 per annum, considerably ahead of the private sector of €45,557. Public servants also have generous holiday entitlements; pension arrangements, even for those who joined after the 1995 reforms, are enviable while they also enjoy an automatic €2,000 plus increment for every year of the first five years on the same pay scale, on condition they pass their performance review, which given the unassailable power of the public service unions, they invariably pass.
Latest figures from the Department of Public Expenditure reveal that the total public sector pay bill for 2024 is running at about €28.1billion. In 2013 it was €16.2billion meaning that there has been a 73.4% increase in public sector pay in a decade.
Doubtless the Government trusts its generosity will be remembered at the ballot box by the lucky 15% of the workforce who have enjoyed constantly swelling pay packets over the years. Time will tell but one thing we can say at this stage is that the heavy investment in public service wages has scarcely resulted in greater efficiency or even a better performance.
For all the money lavished upon it, large swathes of the public service are shambolic and doggedly resistant to change and reform. In many departments there is lack of staff with specialist skills and an absence of digital and computer skills, particularly among old hands and senior staff.
In such an old school environment where an uncompromising ‘it’s not my job’ mentality prevails and senior staff are often more focused on promotion or retirement than their work ethic, more and more work is contracted out at great expense with outside agencies often used to plug gaps.
External creative agencies often provide photographic and videographic services to Government departments that could produce the material themselves at a fraction of the cost if they had an inhouse team.
Event management companies also profit from the lack of versatility among public service staff and rigid job specs. A few years
‘Investment in public service wages didn’t bring efficiency’
‘Large swathes of the public services are shambolic’
ago, it emerged that the Government had paid more than €1million for media monitoring services, with the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection paying out more than double the amount of any other body.
RTÉ can console itself that waste and squandering public money are not its speciality but are endemic right across the public service machine.
It also seems a problem across the Irish Sea in Whitehall, where proposals to reform were met with ‘eyerolling, disengagement and aversion tactics by top civil servants’, according to a report last year.
As any trade unionist worth their salt will acknowledge, the biggest lever for delivering reform is pay.
The announcement of the new pay deal gave a nod to public service reform but a frustrating lack of concrete details about how that will be achieved.
You don’t have to be a fortune teller or even a cynic to say that this new pay deal will come to pass without producing one shred of reform or putting one extra garda on the beat.