Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We will ask for that correspondence to be taken up.

No. 284B refers to an issue the committee has been dealing with. It is from Deputy Matt Shanahan and is dated 11 January. It raises concerns about the recently advertised role of the Secretary General of the Department of Health. At our meeting on 14 January, the committee agreed to write to the acting Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform in relation to the matters raised. This letter issued on 19 January. We also agreed at our private meeting yesterday to proceed to make an application to the committee on remit and oversight - the committee on procedure - to examine the processes by which high level remuneration in the public service is determined.

It is proposed to advise Deputy Shanahan of that. We thrashed out this issue at length and we sent him a lengthy letter. We also sent a lengthy letter to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform in which we asked 14 questions. I think Deputy Shanahan's letter even made a recent appearance in the media. At yesterday's meeting we agreed to write to the acting Secretary General. It is a very serious issue and people are wondering what exactly has happened here. It is four weeks since the matter was first raised publicly and, at this point, we are no clearer as to who made the decision to bump up the pay by €81,000 or why the decision was taken. Was the decision made by civil servants or politicians? We are told it was not the Government. Was it a group of Ministers? The question is who was involved. We are no clearer on the matter.

Lately, there was a suggestion that part of the reason is that given the head of the HSE, Mr. Paul Reid, is on an amount in the region of €360,000 that the Secretary General of the Department supervising him would need to be on a higher salary than €210,000 to do that. I am not sure of the logic of that, because the Secretary General of the Department of Finance is in a supervisory role to some extent over the Garda Commissioner, who is on more than €300,000, and the CEO of the National Treasury Management Agency. Deputies Carthy and Catherine Murphy flagged the issue.