Lenihan says debate on U-turn on pay cuts for civil servants 'begrudgery'

MINISTER FOR Finance Brian Lenihan has described much of the debate about his controversial U-turn on pay cuts for higher level civil servants as showing a “great deal of populism and begrudgery”.

Mr Lenihan said he was “extraordinarily conscious of the need for fairness in the sacrifices we have all had to make in dealing with this most acute financial and economic crisis. Over the last 18 months, the Government has had to make very difficult decisions. In doing so, we have done all we can to protect the lower paid and those on social welfare.”

Those who earned most had paid most, he insisted.

He was responding to the Fine Gael private member’s motion calling for a reversal of what the party’s finance spokesman Richard Bruton described as a “sweetheart deal” for 655 senior public servants. Their bonus payments, cut in the budget, were reinstated.

During the debate, there was persistent Opposition pressure on Fianna Fáil backbencher Mattie McGrath to follow through on his threat to “maybe” vote against the Government on the debate.

Mr McGrath was the most vocal Government opponent of the U- turn for senior servants at Fianna Fáil parliamentary party meetings.

Fine Gael’s Michael Ring told the Dáil: “I hope he won’t be another lion in the constituency and mouse in the Dáil.”

Mr Lenihan said the Government was guided in the need to cut €1 billion in public pay “by the need to ensure that those who earned more would contribute more and that office holders and other senior public servants would lead by example”.

The reductions “are balanced and progressive but they are not painless and will adversely impact on all public servants in their daily lives. All of us have to adapt our financial commitments and living standards to our available income, so any measures which reduce that income require immediate and difficult adjustments.”

Mr Bruton said the decision to exempt those civil servants from the full impact of pay cuts was unfair and unjustifiable.

Two weeks after the budget, the Minister issued a direction under financial emergency legislation “exempting these top public servants from the proposed pay cut”.

“The legislation is very clear and directs that the Minister may only do this if there is a ‘substantial inequity’ and if it is ‘just and equitable in all the circumstances’,” Mr Bruton said.

“Remarkably, in the time since that decision was taken, explanations offered by the Government as to why the decision was made have ranged from the incredible to the downright inaccurate.”

Sinn Féin’s Aengus Ó Snodaigh said the reversal was rubbing salt in the wounds of the cuts imposed on lower-paid civil servants, who were on “slave wages”.

He noted the “self-congratulatory” tone of the Minister’s amendment to the motion. The Minister noted the cumulative effect of the cuts in pay, but “it doesn’t note the cumulative impact of the cuts in pay of tens of thousands of civil servants living at the threshold of poverty or below it”.