Public Service pay deal - Government must control public purse

THE incineration of the vital research documentation behind Ireland’s lucrative benchmarking pay deal for public sector workers must rank as one of the great wage negotiation scandals of all time.

Predictably, though designed to bring them into line with their counterparts in the private sector, the deal has seen public servants race ahead on the pay scale, though this is strongly denied by the IMPACT union, which has more than 55,000 public service members.

Nonetheless, the generosity of benchmarking is borne out by statistics issued yesterday by the CSO showing, for instance, that gardaí now earn an average of almost €67,000 a year, including €15,000 overtime. That is more than double the average industrial wage, which stood at €32,432 in December 2006.