ASSISTANT SECRETARIES would have faced an average 18 per cent reduction in pay had the levy imposed on all other public servants applied to them, Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan said as he defended the decision to reverse cuts for these senior public servants.

Mr Lenihan said it would have been “well in excess” of reductions faced by Ministers, TDs, Senators and principal officers.

However, Fine Gael finance spokesman Richard Bruton told the Minister that “the way you got to that 18 per cent was by pretending that they were entitled to bonus pay every year, regardless of performance, and that was never the intention of the bonus scheme”.

The levy was imposed in the budget on all public sector employees, but the Department of Finance then announced it would not apply to assistant secretaries.

Mr Bruton said it was “unfair to be asking people who are on the lowest pay within the public service to pay their full due but those who are in high posts slipped out of this position”.

Mr Burton called for a debate as “bonuses that should only be paid for exceptional achievement should not be regarded, as the Minister has done, as part of the core pay of those public servants”.

Mr Lenihan said “this particular bonus arrangement was unique to this category of public servant”. The statutory instrument or legal order to impose it “has been adopted, and there are no proposals to make time available to discuss it”.

Labour leader Eamon Gilmore pointed to comments by Tánaiste Mary Coughlan in the Dáil that the inclusion of the bonus as salary was recommended by the review body on higher remuneration. “She told us that the review body on higher level pay indicated that the bonus was ‘indicatively’ part of salary”. But Mr Gilmore said the report actually stated the reverse.

Labour finance spokeswoman Joan Burton asked who exactly was involved in the cut reversal because senior executives, county managers and others all had bonus arrangements which were supposed to have ended.

She said “a more junior public servant, many of them now taking home less than €500 a week, feel very aggrieved that special arrangements have been made for people who although they’re not necessarily hugely well paid are certainly far better paid than people on the lower ranks of the public service who are taking big reductions as well as big tax hikes”.

Mr Lenihan insisted that a clerical officer at the middle of the pay scale suffered a net loss of about 11.7 per cent in the last three budgets, and while it was a “very significant loss” an assistant secretary “has suffered a net loss of over 20 per cent of pay and a deputy secretary of over 27 per cent of pay”.