Anne-Marie Walshe: It's not a mass exodus and it won't cause sea change for public sector
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THE retirement of thousands of public servants before the end of this month has nothing to do with the Government trying to cut the number of state employees.
It is about public servants getting out before their pensions are hit by a pay cut that reduced their wages two years ago.
Their salaries dropped by an average of around 6pc because of these pay cuts.
Now their pensions are finally about to catch up.
They hadn't caught up until now because the previous government kept extending a 'grace period' that allowed them to retire without feeling the effects of the cuts in their pensions.
The Croke Park deal extended the period in which the January 2010 pay reductions would be "disregarded" for pension purposes by a year.
Now D-day has arrived, there is hysteria about a mass exodus.
What is really happening is that any public servant who was already planning to retire this year, is most likely to go before March.
Therefore, the normal amount of retirements this year will speed up and take place in a much shorter timeframe than usual.
The Department of Finance said 7,770 public servants had applied to go by the closing date yesterday.
But the numbers that will actually go between now and the end of the month is probably closer to 6,000.
This is because roughly 1,500 of the 7,770 workers it says have applied have already gone in the health sector.
In addition, all of the public servants who have applied to get out by the end of the month still reserve the right to back out.
If 6,000 go, this is about the same as the number of public servants that would normally retire in any given year.
Between 5,000 and 6,000 public servants leave the public service in a year, although some frontline staff including teachers and nurses are replaced.
The Department of Finance said it expected there would be about 9,000 retirements in total this year.
So this means that up to 3,000 will exit over and above what they would normally expect.
But Public Expenditure and Reform Minister Brendan Howlin has promised to take on up to 3,000 public servants to fill gaps in strained services, despite the ban on hiring.
He could also pull out that old chestnut of 'redeployment' in the Croke Park deal to move staff to fill crisis points as a contingency plan, and if all else fails, keep hiring agency staff.
The end result could be zero or very little change in the size of the public sector beyond what would normally be expected by the end of the year.
Irish Independent
