Sir, – Joe Patton (December 28th) has repeated a misleading figure on the income of public servants.
In response to a parliamentary question the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Brendan Howlin, confirmed earlier this month that just over 2 per cent of public employees (6,791) were paid more than €100,000, and that 75 per cent of those in public service are in fact paid less than €60,000. Mr Howlin confirmed that these salary figures include the budgetary pay cut to public service pay which came into effect on January 1st 2010, but exclude the impact on gross salaries of the 2009 pension levy, which imposed an additional average pay cut of 7 per cent effective from March 2009.
The number of those paid in excess of €100,000 is considerably less than the 17,500 claimed by Mr Patton. But that is a figure he would have read about in the Irish Timessome weeks ago, which claimed 17,447 public servants earned over €100,000. That report also wrongly suggested that there were almost 429,000 State employees in 2009 when the actual figure has never exceeded 320,000. Those figures, from the Revenue Commissioners, included all the commercial semi-state companies, where salaries are not paid by the exchequer. They also included the total taxable earnings of anyone who is paid anything by the public sector. For example, a private sector company director who received €5,000 for being on a State board, and over €100,000 from their private sector income, is likely to appear in these figures as a "public servant" earning over €100,000.
The figures also showed the jointly assessed incomes of taxpayers, where one or more spouse is a public servant, as a single “public servant”. So, if a public servant earns €52,000 and their spouse earns €49,000 in the private sector, they are shown in these figures as a public servant earning over €100,000.
As the debate about public sector pay will no doubt continue to rage in the coming months, let us not allow accuracy become the first casualty. – Yours, etc,