Alison O'Connor: We haven't had enough salary shaming when it comes to our top civil servants

Robert Watt's proposed pay increase alone – €81,000 – is way more than twice the median annual earnings of Irish workers

Robert Watt has been appointed interim secretary general of the Department of Health. If, as all expect, he gets the job, it will be on a salary of about €292,000, meaning he gets a pay hike of €81,000. Picture: Gareth Chaney, Collins

Personally, I’d be utterly mortified. I don’t care how many courses you’d done to improve your self-worth or how often your parents told you as a child that you were so special you could hang the stars. How many 'because I’m worth it' vibes would a person need to be channelling to allow themselves to accept an obnoxiously large public service salary bonus in the middle of a pandemic?

Having said that, how could a Government award such a belter of a salary to a public servant – the clue is in the title – at a time like this? If this is salary shaming, well then we haven’t had enough of it.