Soooo many of these payouts?

I know there's plenty of decent hard working people in public services.

But it does look that there's plenty being allowed take the utter p**s as well.

Do other European countries have this problem?

I'd say there is a lot of similar stories in other countries, can't be just us.

There's corruption and the rich looking after the rich/their mates happening everywhere.

The lady in question was a secretary general of a govt dept. This is a position with a salary 230k-258k.

The article is unclear what the severance is? Is it a just a retirement lump sum - which would be high due to the salary. Mind you, the pic looks like a woman not of retiring age.

Was it a case of a redundancy payment? Did Martin's department merge any former standalone govt depts, thereby making this Sec Gen position redundant?

Oh, ok. Why the severance payment? Early incentivised and retirement scheme?

But she left this position before all this controversy arose. Are you speculating that she was helped out the door more than a year ago due to clashes with the Minister??

Interesting.

What scheme did they cloak her departure under? You can't just get rid of a civil servant in that manner.

Where did you see that a delivery driver had been paid 1 euro an hour? And is that driver still being paid 1 euro an hour?

There was clearly no “one off redundancy” or “restructuring” in Licken’s case, though.

Licken was the Secretary General of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. The role clearly still exists in the exact same form it did previously. She was replaced by Feargal Ó Coigligh, who is the current Secretary General of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. Redundancy means that the role is eliminated - which it clearly is not. Restructuring means that the team structure is changing that causes a role or roles to be redundant - which again can’t have happened in this case.

You can’t somehow hide the removal of the very top Civil Servant in a Government department behind “restructuring” - because the structure exists in plain sight, and that position is the very top of it.

There must have been an actual reason for her going.

I don't know how they spin it but she was effectively fired. To prevent her going to the WRC with all the dirty laundry, they paid her off. Mutual agreement.

I wonder what it is that makes a person like this worth 10 times the minimum wage?

The system to pay a years salary to Sec Generals who reached their 7 years was brought up some time ago and no one was really objecting. In the past a sec general stayed to retirement age but the gov decided it would be better to give them a 7 year term (which many people agree is good to keep ideas fresh). Combine that with merit based instead of seniority based promotion (which many people called for) and you have a problem of people in their early 50's reaching then end of a 7 year term as Sec General. What are the government to do with these people if Seg gen roles are now merit based as you cant just move them sideways - should a person in their 50's be forced out of work without a full pension just because they managed to get promoted to Sec General in their 40's. The solution was a payment of 1 years salary.

It may not be perfect but what are the alternatives.

Thanks for the explanation.

Very disingenuous of The Indo not to explain that it's a standard part of the contract. The article makes it look like there's underhand shenanigans going on.