REPORT CONTENTS:A NUMBER of benefits and special allowances available to public servants should be reviewed or abolished, the McCarthy report recommends.
Public sector pensions, bonuses to HSE staff and the axing of the tipstaffs grade in the Courts Service are among the measures outlined by Colm McCarthy.
Mr McCarthy said the extent to which some public servants were given accelerated pensions was “not widely known or appreciated by the general public”.
PENSIONS
He said a private sector employee would have to put away as much as 87 per cent of their salary to afford the same pension as a High Court judge.
A High Court judge, appointed at the age of 50, would be able to retire at the age of 65 with a full pension, effectively adding 25 years to their service given that most public servants are only entitled to a full pension after 40 years of service.
In the case of a garda who joins at the age of 20 and retires at 50 on a full pension, a private sector employee would have to allocate 48 per cent of their salary each month to earn an equivalent pension.
Overall, a private sector employee would have to put away 27 per cent of their salary to earn the equivalent pension of a typical civil servant, rising to 31 per cent for teachers and 33 per cent for hospital consultants.
Mr McCarthy said changes advocated in the Government’s Green Paper on pensions published in 2007, should be implemented in full.
They include increasing the rate of pension contributions from staff, moving to a calculation of pensions on the basis of “career average” earnings rather than final salary and the removal of fast accrual terms.
He noted that the only people not affected by the measures outlined in his report were people currently in receipt of public service pensions.
There was now a case to consider how best to “secure an appropriate contribution from this sector of society”, he said.
ALLOWANCES
The report identified allowances and extra payments made to public servants particularly teachers and gardaí.
The report notes that supervision and substitution in the primary and secondary school sector costs €300 million a year and arise from a set of “working terms, conditions and practices for teachers which are very restrictive to norms elsewhere within both the public and private sectors”.
More than half of all Irish teachers get a management allowance which costs the State €236 million a year.
It also identified 57 allowances for gardaí costing €217 million, all of them pensionable benefits, including rent allowance (€58.9 million), €9 million to members who are on leave and would ordinarily be entitled to unsocial hours payments, and a plain clothes allowance of €1.9 million, though the clothes are not provided.
The report says €15 million could be saved in the Prison Service by curtailing similar allowances.
A total of 111 staff in the HSE got bonus payments in 2006 worth €1.24 million. Such payments should be eliminated, Mr McCarthy said.
He also advocates reducing staffing levels in Youth Detention Centres where there are currently seven staff for every inmate.
LEAVE ARRANGEMENTS
Teachers are allowed 31 days uncertified leave each year and 30 days at secondary school level.
The OECD estimates that the “total statutory working time” of teachers is more than double the average “teaching time” of teachers in the Irish school system, although that does not factor in time spent on school planning and parent-teacher meetings.
In addition, 100,000 teaching days had be filled because of in-service teacher training.
SUPPORT STAFF
The report advocates reducing the number of county registrars from 26 to 15.
It also advocates getting rid of the 91 tipstaffs working in the courts service.
It says the role of tipstaffs, which involve ushering the judge to court and performing such roles as receiving visitors to the judge’s chambers, filing judgments or obtaining law books and driving the judge’s care is “questionable” in a modern judicial system.
It also says the court service is riddled with outdated practices and there is a need for the courts to be open all year round.
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