And the 8% increase in the pay of the country's 272,000 public servants does not take account of any increase from the benchmarking pay report, which is due to be published after the general election in June.

Nor does it provide for any possible pay increases that the country's 40,000 nurses may extract from the exchequer in the lead-up to the election.

But above and beyond the expected pay pressures, the real concern in the Department of Finance is that over 500m of that 1.3bn increase, or almost 40%, is to pay the wages of an extra 10,000 public servants hired this year.

In 2002, the then Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy, decided to cap public service numbers at their then level of around 240,000. But despite McCreevy's ban, the numbers employed have risen to 272,000 this year.

Health and education have been the most consistent offenders in this area and have effectively ignored the ban on recruitment.

And it is no different this year. Of the extra 10,000 public servants recruited for this year, 6,700 will be employed in health and 3,500 in education.