Last month, Irish soldiers assigned to the EU Battlegroup, which is designed to act as the bloc’s rapid response force, got an unwelcome surprise.
Christmas pay packets would be smaller than expected, they were told. The problem was that, while on Battlegroup exercises in Hungary and Germany, they had mistakenly been paid a higher rate of daily allowances usually only available to soldiers while on standby in Ireland.
The mistake had to be fixed and that could only be achieved by clawing back the money from their December salary payments.
The amounts were small, no more than €140 per person, and fewer than 200 people were impacted. But the move left a sour taste in the mouths of…