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Shoes, health insurance top ups and school fees - public service allowances revealed
Millions in school fees and cost of living expenses are paid to those posted overseas, while details of allowances paid across many of the departments have been revealed.
DETAILS OF ALLOWANCES paid to some civil servants in various government departments have revealed that millions are paid to those posted overseas for school fees and the cost of living.
The figures also show that most departments afford service officers a €65 shoe allowance for outdoor duties and that press officers in the Department of the Taoiseach recieve five hours of overtime paid at double time every week for “on-call” services.
The allowances have been revealed in response to a series of parliamentary questions tabled by Fianna Fáil spokesperson on public expenditure and reform.
A total of over €2.3 million is paid to staff – 325 at any one time – from the Department of Foreign Affairs in cost of living allowances, while the Children’s Foreign Allowance, which compensates officers for additional costs incurred with regard to their children in full time education, comes in at €709,000.
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In some circumstances school fees assistance is also paid at an estimated cost of over €1 million per annum.
Some protocol and Government press office staff are entitled to an annual clothing allowance of €444 per year while some departments pay a child allowance of just over €2 a week to staff who have worked in the civil service since before 1978. This is paid until the child is 21 if they remain in full time education.
Many departments emphasised that allowances are currently under review by the Department of Expenditure and Public Reform , while the Department for Social Protection emphasised that the “great majority of the department’s staff do not receive any of these allowances”.
Other allowances include:
Health insurance top-up for Department of Foreign Affairs officers working abroad: €811,000 collectively per annum
Private secretary allowance for the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform: €188 – €792 per fortnight
Driving allowance for the Department of Social Protection: €43 per week
On call allowance for the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht: €19 per week, additional €48.75 per callout
Explosive ordnance duty allowance for members of the Defence Forces: €92.57 per day
Here’s an example of some of the allowances paid to staff in the Department of the Taoiseach:
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Sunflowers are far smarter than some Journal readers who insist on following an impossibility , after all, the sun rise and sets each day in response to one rotation -
” It is a fact not generally known that,owing to the difference between solar and sidereal time,the Earth rotates upon its axis once more often than there are days in the year” Harvard
@Jenny mcCarty: It is rare to encounter a person who can reason properly and have some sense of why our nation and the international community ended up with horrific notions such as one weekday and one rotation are not the same thing. I have dealt with these issues for many years and I am familiar with where people jumped the tracks, in this case they modelled rotation using a clock and came up with a value less than 24 hours with the accumulation over the year giving them one more rotation than weekdays. Common sense should intervene but these people are unapologetic while the young sunflowers simply fix their gaze on the central and stationary Sun and allow the rotation of the Earth to do the work once each weekday and every weekday.
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