In the company I work for there used to be 3 days sick paid per annum, this was removed last year with total agreement by all the staff to help keep wage reductions to a minimum (10%) and avoid lay offs. Sick days are now unpaid. Since last year sick leave has virtually disappeared. Why can't the government get its act together and take away non statuary sick leave completely from the PS.

Because they dont have balls and are not paying them directly ( out of their own pocket )


In the Gardai in the 80s you weren`t allowed use phones for personal use
Nowadays the State pay the entire mobile phone bill of all staff that qualify for this perk. Competitive or what

Last week in an east of Ireland hospital, when srevices were being shut down the drugs were packed up from the store room and sent to a HSE facility in a nearby town where they could use them.

On arrival they were promptly binned as some of the use by dates were a bit close............ early 2011 .

A vigilant foreign worker promptly said "you cant do that" and removed them from the bin and posted them to her home country for use by people who do appreciate the value of drugs.

Unfortunately a lot of it is made up. Rank and file gardaí use their own mobile phones for work and so far as I know they are not reimbursed for work related calls.

Any chance of telling us which "East of Ireland" bodies are involved here?

Your thread is full of the usual negative, Irish self-hating hyperbole.

You sourced information from the Irish Times on the department with the worst sick leave record and then used that information to ask why people working in Ireland find it ok to defraud their employers. As usual the bandwagon nearly collapsed with the weight of those ready to slate ourselves at any given chance and not one person asked for overall comparable statistics with other countries. For example, at one stage in the early 2000s workers in Norway had the worst sick leave record in Europe for 3years running: NORWAY: NORWAY TOPS EUROPEAN STATISTICS FOR SICK LEAVE.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included) - IPR Strategic Business Information Database | Encyclopedia.com

Have a look at the graph in this article from Finfacts: Going sick to work or staying home healthy? - How national sickness-leave regulations affect workplace absences

Although overall stats for Ireland are not included one should note that 5 countries out of twenty had an overall average sick leave worse than the department cited in your IT link.

Undoubtedly, like most northern European countries Ireland has a serious sick leave issue but try a more balanced approach in future.

__________________
In order for evil to succeed...and so on..everyone knows it..

Answer the question then ?

I`m not worried about Norway. If there sick days are greater than ours then they are a lazy shower of........

Maybe that Town Clerk was just new to the job or just about to leave the next day?

Remember the stats are "average", a lot of people working in these agencies are conscientious, don't take much if any "sickos". Think how their colleagues feel then when they are taking double the average and they are left at their desk to pick up the crap. Why can the government sort this waste of tax payers money out quickly? And no I don't mean pay a "ZEN" consultant €1000
a day to re arrange the deck chairs. Remove this ridiculous anomaly. Not statutory therefore we don't pay.

Remember all the prison officers that were "sick", others covered and got overtime. As soon as they was stamped out, they got a lot less sick.

If you leave a large group of people with the option to scam , many of them (not all obviously) will stay at home and watch t.v knowing they get paid just as much as if they go to work.