Private to Public sector: Salary

The point OP makes is a good one, it's fair to pay people in line with with their experience, whether that comes from within the public, or private sector. It's clear that there is a disincentive for private sector employees to join the public service as-is, which ultimately isn't good for the public service either as diversity of experience will make for a better outcomes. It sounds like a simple enough change to make too; make the exceptional process whereby a candidate can join at a higher point on the scale, with the appropriate justification, become the standard practice for all hires.

I don't get this. Most private sector orgs will expect you to name your salary expectations and justify or negotiate it.

Admittedly places that doesn't even give you a guide as to the salary range is annoying, but there's no difference between a public sector employee interviewing and a private sector employee interviewing in this case.

Absolutely, although isn't that already the case? The point the OP makes is that there is an in-built disincentive in the public sector hiring process for people with experience from the private sector. Those individuals will not have accrued points on the scale, and will be offered a starting salary lower than those with public sector experience, who are being paid for their experience.

The solution is to apply for roles that are at a grade that match your private sector experience and salary. You might usually have to start at the lowest level in a particular grade but you don't have to start at the lowest grade.

External candidates to senior public sector jobs dont stand a chance, as there is always a bias to pick senior managers who are coming from existing public sector roles. This means the only available roles to outsiders tend to be at lower levels. Private sector workers at senior levels either need to join at point 1 of a lower level scale, or stay in the private sector. I think the civil service would benefit from some external experience that might freshen things up, but it is not going to happen. As with OP, after you climb the ranks in the private sector, public sector careers are just not an option.

This is one of the greatest challenges in PS recruitment imo. To match private sector experience and salary (or come close enough to make the paycut reasonable when the other benefits of public sector work) for technical roles, you have to look at Grade VII or Grade VIII roles and these are almost exclusively senior management positions. As Flinty pointed out (correctly imo) in this thread, great technical staff can often make very poor managers (and frequently have no interest in such work).

I've seen some moves towards adressing this within some engineering and IS Analyst / Developer roles in Local Authorities but only so far that it might help attract a recent graduate with a 3-5 years experience to stay for a few years (40k - 60k range, i.e. approximately half what a senior technical resource could expect for equivalent positions in the private sector). That level of paycut might be worthwhile if your family happened to have land you could get a parcel of approved for building a house on near a rural council but for Dublin/Cork/Galway it'd be consigning yourself to never being able to buy your own home unless you were already independently wealthy (or partnered to someone with a much higher salary)

I think the distinction between 'public sector' and the 'civil service' is very important here.

If you're a physiotherapist working in the Beacon and you go for a job in a HSE hospital, it's no big deal. Or an IT admin, or a HR specialist.

I cannot conceive of any job in the private sector that would qualify you as an EO or AP in the civil service.