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Top civil servant in Catherine Martin’s department received €219,000 severance payment

Martin and her department have been at centre of controversy over payments to senior figures in RTÉ over recent months

Katherine Licken (left), former secretary general of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, with Catherine Martin. Photograph: Sasko Lazarov/Photocall Ireland

Martin Wall
Fri Mar 8 2024 - 19:18

The former top civil servant in the Government department headed by Minister for Media Catherine Martin received a severance payment of nearly €220,000 earlier this year.

The Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media said the payment – which was made to its former secretary general Katherine Licken – was in line with contractual entitlements and calculated in accordance with official Government rules.

Ms Martin and her department have been at the centre of controversy over payments to senior figures in RTÉ over recent months.

Last month the office of Ms Martin wrote to the Oireachtas Committee on Media to say it would not be appropriate following her retirement for Ms Licken to appear at a hearing to discuss the circumstances around the resignation of RTÉ chairwoman Siún Ní Raghallaigh.

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The committee was seeking to explore a phone call between the two women last October in which Ms Ní Raghallaigh has maintained she said the RTÉ board had signed off on an exit package for its former chief financial officer Richard Collins – something Ms Licken says she has no recollection of.

Figures provided by the department to TDs Catherine Murphy, Alan Kelly and Carol Nolan on foot of parliamentary questions this week showed that a severance payment of €219,240 was paid to one individual in Ms Martin’s department earlier this year.

A spokesman for the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media said that the figure provided to the TDs represented “a secretary general severance payment”.

The spokesman said the severance payment was “was made in accordance with the Top Level Appointments Committee (TLAC) retirement terms that apply to new appointments to secretary general posts since October 2011″.

Ms Licken stepped down earlier this year, having completed seven years as secretary general.

In a second statement on Friday night the department indicated that the severance paid to the former secretary general was separate to her pension arrangements.

“The department can confirm that this payment relates to Katherine Licken’s retirement from her post as secretary general.

“Pension arrangements are dealt with by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and  the National Shared Services Office  and the Department would not have sight of these details.”

Rules on payments to secretaries general in Government departments were reformed by former Minister for Public Expenditure Brendan Howlin in 2011 following controversy over lucrative retirement arrangements for some at the highest levels of the Civil Service.

As part of the reforms, for those taking up secretary general posts after November 2011, no added years were to be provided for pension purposes when their seven-year term ended.

No pension was to be paid before the individual concerned reached the minimum retirement age.

However, where a person had been appointed secretary general of a department from within the Civil Service and did not have the full 40 years of pensionable service before their term ended, the government was to offer an alternative post.

The 2011 rules said that no severance would be paid except where the person concerned was not of minimum pension age or had not been offered an alternative post.

In such cases a severance payment of up to one year’s salary would apply. No severance payment would be made where someone refused the offer of an alternative post.

Martin Wall

Martin Wall

Martin Wall is the former Washington Correspondent of The Irish Times. He was previously industry correspondent

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