Brexiteer businessman voices shock at figures showing public workers are paid more than private ones: 'Northern Ireland's economy is fundamentally broken!'

He has also told the News Letter that if the DUP does indeed re-enter Stormont and take the £3bn-plus funding package offered by the Tories, then it will just make the problem of Northern Irish dependency on Westminster worse.

As reported, official government figures show that the median salary in Northern Ireland’s public sector is £31,839, and in the private sector it is £25,467.

The median is the "middle" number in a series, when those numbers are listed in order from smallest to greatest.

The average salary meanwhile is £33,873 per year in the public sector, and £31,190 in the private sector.

Private sector workers also worked slightly longer hours on average: 37.4 per week, compared with 37 in the public sector, and around 92% of public workers in Northern Ireland have a pension, compared with only 62% of private ones.

However public pay is falling, whilst private pay is rising.

• Details here: News Letter breaks down public sector pay versus private sector pay in wake of large-scale strike action

Mr Habib (a former candidate for the Brexit Party and boss of the First Property Group, as well as a staunch anti-Protocol campaigner) said of the figures above: “The private sector has been killed. It suggests the private sector simply is not functioning.

"Private sector wages should be higher than public sector. This is shocking! The private sector is where you take a risk, and therefore there should be a reward for that risk.

"You get much better tenure and much better benefits when you're in the public sector – and pension – which you don't get in the private sector.

"This is happening in the UK across the board, with massive government intervention and the state taking more and more control of the economy.

"It’s happening either through universal credit making up more of their wages or the state setting up all these semi-governmental organisations on diversity-equity-and-inclusion, monitoring this and that. The state's exploding and killing off the private sector. It's a stark reality in Northern Ireland.

"What this says to me is that Northern Ireland's economy is fundamentally broken.”

When it comes to the prospect of a Stormont revival, Mr Habib said: “If the DUP are about to restore Stormont because they've just been paid £3.3bn pounds, which is the rumour I'm hearing, they're just doing more of this kind of thing, which has already broken the economy.

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"You need a new economic settlement for Northern Ireland. You need to cut corporation tax, and you need to cut back on environmental, social, and corporate governance [ESG].

"This is a sign of a completely dependent, broken economy, and to take another £3.3bn is to just embed the problem even more.

"It'll be a sticking plaster, without actuall assisting people in earning more money, growing the economy, standing on their own two feet.”