Seanad debates

Wednesday, 8 October 2003

As people who have been in Government well know, including all Ministers for Finance, if tonight I grant a small concession to any group in the public service, even an additional post or a small allowance for perhaps two people, by Friday week I will have knock-on effects throughout the public service. In some negotiations the line Minister would say that he or she had given only one concession only to be forced into others. We in the Department of Finance would point out that if we gave it to one group, we would have problems way down the line. In a few months we would have problems with all other sectors. That is the big difficulty with all public sector pay and anyone who has been involved in it knows that. One of the conditions of the benchmarking body was that we would deal with measuring and weighing people in the public sector against those in the private sector in that manner and that those relativities would be over. That is one of the things to which the unions and the Government have signed up.

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