Madam, – As the Government reviews its spreadsheets in preparation for the coming budget, I, a humble member of the electorate, would like to offer one simple idea from which I believe it could generate at least €1 billion in savings.
If the public service paybill eats up 70 per cent of government expenditure, why don’t we impose a maximum wage on everyone paid by the public purse? If the Government selected a figure between €150,000 and €200,000 per annum; surely this would be adequate remuneration for anyone on a steady job with no fear of redundancy, especially now as house prices and the cost of living have been so dramatically reduced in Ireland?
It seems almost obscene that the public are paying the CEOs of the semi-State companies (often monopolies) several times this amount. The ESB, for instance, has been targeted by the regulator to lose up to 400,000 customers; a performance that should hardly warrant excessive salaries or bonuses. Many banks are now effectively owned by the taxpayer and their collective performance would not suggest that they have staff worth over the figure suggested – if they do, they have been hiding their lights under a bushel for quite some time.
The top names in public broadcasting can no longer delude the public that there is a market for their talents elsewhere and that we need to pay them up to €1 million to continue to entertain (or depress) us. In a downbeat global economy, any other opportunities that may have once been there, have evaporated. The same goes for medical consultants, HSE bureaucrats, university professors, Ministers, senior civil servants and the management teams of the various quangoes.
Their paybill is a heavy anchor preventing the agile, upward movement of our economy into a smarter, more entrepreneurial, ideas-led successful country. The Government needs to invest in innovation and the infrastructure to make it flourish and pouring excessive amounts into the dead weight of national administration is not going to contribute to economic recovery. – Yours, etc,