Local authority salaries - No sign that gravy train is stopping

There seems no end to the excesses of the public sector, judging by today’s report on local authority salaries.

Despite calls to cut the number of lucrative senior posts in Ireland’s city and county councils, the gravy train rolls on.

Beleaguered taxpayers, suffering under the austerity regime, are forking out €1m a year to nearly every council in Ireland to underpin high salaries for senior civil servants. Despite emergency pay cuts, the highest earners remain protected.

This makes a mockery of efforts to bring the public sector into line. It is also further proof, if it were needed, that the Croke Park deal has created a cosseted elite.

Though an exodus of personnel was seen in the retirement scheme, most councils remain top heavy with senior staff who earn over €100,000 a year.

Scrutinising the salaries of directors of services, the highest paid positions after county managers, the report found that, from a starting point of €90,453, their pay jumps by annual increments of €4,000 up to €107,000 a year. At present, a litany of local authorities — including Kerry, Galway, Donegal, Wicklow, Kildare, Carlow, Cork, and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown — have five or more service directors, while most other councils have three or four. South Dublin has eight service directors while Cork has 10.

Surely it is not an essential precondition of local authority service that councils should employ so many highly paid people. It is the result of organisations being given fat pay deals by successive governments.

An official report on improving local government efficiency is either gathering dust on a ministerial shelf or being ignored. Among other measures, it sought a minimum cut of 20% in the number of service directors, plus a 15% reduction at senior executive level and similar cuts among engineers at senior, executive, and assistant level.

There are also widespread anomalies in pay levels. For example, the salaries of county librarians peak at €84,036 but the ceiling for Dublin city librarian is €106,900, while Sligo’s chief librarian gets €86,573. Curiously, the post of veterinary inspector reveals glaring inconsistencies. Inexplicably, South Tipperary has four veterinary inspectors, earning from €60,555 to €94,393, whereas most local authorities, including North Tipperary, have only one.

Against this bewildering backdrop, the suggestion that Ireland needs only four county councils has a lot going for it. A proposal that warrants serious consideration, it envisages having one council for Dublin, another for Munster, a third for Leinster, and the fourth would be Connacht/Ulster.

No country, especially one with a broken economy, can afford to carry a system riddled with inefficiencies and where highly paid jobs are replicated at enormous cost. There is a compelling case for local authorities to introduce joint administrative areas across neighbouring counties, greater efficiency in procurement, better financial management, more use of shared services, annual reporting to the Oireachtas, and more realistic pay levels.