The Minister for Public Expenditure Brendan Howlin has called for greater transparency regarding the salaries currently available for public servants.
Mr Howlin’s comments come in the wake of the recent salary top up controversy in which the government claimed they cannot stop any public sector workers from receiving hefty bonuses. The controversial issue arose two years ago when voluntary hospitals and other health service managers, received a significant sum on top of their annual salaries. Mr Howlin claimed that legally in the vast majority of cases the coalition cannot take away those payments.
Mr Howlin told reporters: “Certainly in the public service, we need to have complete transparency in how pay is made up.’ “We need to ensure that headline figures are actually in compliance with pay norms and that we have control over the public pay bill, and that’s something that we have fundamentally altered in the last few years.”