Departmental Staff
Dail Éireann — 2022-03-01
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

The Secretary General of the Department of the Taoiseach is on record as saying that no clear process was followed in deciding to give a 38% pay rise to Robert Watt. He stated “While I would rather there was a much more scientific process for all of these things, there is not.” Some €81,000 extra was given to Mr. Watt, more than the vast majority of workers earn in a whole year as a regular wage, not a pay increase, and with no scientific process for it. We hear that further pay increases of 10% to 15% may possibly be given to those earning over €150,000 in July but that they may be postponed. How can the Taoiseach justify such pay increases for highly-paid officials while most ordinary workers are getting below-inflation pay increases? Instead of pay rises for those at the top, should we not have a maximum pay in the public sector and instead have above-inflation pay rises for ordinary workers in both the private and public sectors?

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2022-03-01/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:50:12+00:00
Sitting date: 2022-03-01