I would disagree. According to poohbear, we have 275,000 civil & public servants. That means about 1 in 15 of Irish people are grossly overpaid.
We also now know that 'rip of Ireland' is because shops are taking advantage of all these overpaid people and are profiteering. The recent Forfas report indicates that cost of doing business in Ireland should only account for about 6% of the rip off.
What country pays clerical officers (for example) as much as Ireland does? People then wonder why prices are so high!
Eh Leghorn I didn't quote 275,000 civil and public servants, that was a previous poster
€22,000 is also the starting point of the Clerical Officer grade is that such huge money?? considering most of them will be working at the front line trying to help the public and getting an unspeakable amount of abuse. There aren't that many people in the private sector who would put up with the crap that a CO gets on the front line of a public department office.
As for Clerical Officers pay, a family member of mine who works in the private decided he'd like to go into the CS as his area of work was drying up, that was until he saw the advertised post with a starting pay of €22,000 he soon changed his mind!! He wanted to know who would work for only that!!
I also pointed out to him that being in the P or C service anymore is not a job for life. Staff since can be let go at the end of their probation which is a year (in my day it was two years) and that the Sec Gen in all Departments now has the authority to sack staff - thats CS don't know about CoCo's, HSE,etc.
There are however fundamental differences between the Civil Service and the Public Service, the Civil Service is basically the secretariat of the Government - no matter who is in government. One of the main differences is that state agencies get their funding from the exchequer via a government department but want to spend it like it was private money.
The Boards of state agencies, are mostly made up of political appointments no matter which party is in government at that time of appointment.
Many of us who liaise with these agencies will say the same thing, they want job security with private company perks. that doesn't work and this is where a lot of current problems are arising.
By the way some earlier poster said they paid their taxes so therefore our wages, I pay tax too so whats the point???
According to the OECD report the CS is one of the smallest in the world which is comparable with our state. However it would seem to be the public service which is particularly overstaffed that would mostly fall into the HSE (most probably). Thats not necessarily the fault of all staff, that problem arose when all Health Boards were amalgamated into the HSE, there should have been redundancies offered then, when there was the money to pay out and jobs for staff to go to in the private sector.