“We fear that the Government may be thinking the unthinkable,” a union source said. “We would urge them to look instead at the pensions.”

“Holidays are stressful, difficult times. It is only reasonable that our members are given time off to recover from them,” he added.

The practice of receiving holidays for taking holidays is one of several perks awarded to public servants by public servants.

Medical experts believed the unnamed individual had suffered an awful trauma and treated him as though he were in a coma since 1986.

To the astonishment of medical staff, however, the man rose from his bed on Tuesday morning and announced that he had to go and attend the picket line for the public service strike.

“This is an extraordinary breakthrough,” a leading coma specialist said. “We are currently reviewing all of our vegetative state cases to see how many of them just suffer from deep lethargy.”

“Obviously, deep lethargy is also a terrible affliction but there is, nonetheless, a glimmer of hope for many families this morning,” he added.

Hairdressers have recruited extra staff for the day while coffee shops are hopeful that cappucino and latte sales will be at a level not seen since the height of the boom.

A number of enterprising people who have become unemployed recently have offered a range of services to the public servants to help them get through their one day strike.

“I’m happy to man the picket for them while they do a bit of shopping,” an unemployed barrister told The Mire. “If they prefer, I could go shopping for them while they man the picket.”

Other unemployed people have offered to fetch soup and hot whiskies for the striking public servants. “We’ll happily do that for tips. We’ll take any small change,” a former developer said.

Any public servants who have been shopping in Asda in the North recently are asked to bring foam cups with them for the hot whiskies.

Small retail units are hopeful that the public servants will boost their meagre sales. Many shops have banner signs saying: ‘Public servants welcome here’.

“We’re offering great incentives to get them into the shops,” one retailer said. “We know they have money to spend. Our only fear is that they are so angry at having secure pensionable employment that they might spend the whole day on strike.”

A trade union spokesman acknowledged that the strike would cause hardship to people who depended most on public services. “However,” he added, “at least public service pay, work conditions, pension provision and lack of productivity hits everyone equally.

Figures vary according to which department the dead employees work in with as many as 64 per cent probably dead in the health service while only 23 per cent appear to be dead in the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism.

“Even if they are dead,” a trade union spokesman said, “they are working as hard as they can in appalling conditions.”

The highly sophisticated monitors were expected to give a clear indication of the percentage of time each public servant spends working and how hard they work during that time. It was hoped, all future public service pay would be based on monitored performance. However, the project has now been shelved.

“The monitors have crashed,” a source said. “Their hard drives have been erased by lethargy, inertia and listlessness. Work activity was detected on only one monitor but after investigation it transpired the employee was working on a nixer.”

The monitors, based on high performance units which are used to gauge performance in elite athletes, will be fitted to 200 public servants after the bank holiday weekend.

The highly sophisticated monitors will give a clear indication of the percentage of time each public servant spends working and how hard they work during that time. If the trial proves successful, all future public service pay will be based on monitored performance.

As the monitors were initially used to gauge the high levels of performance of elite athletes a team of technicians is working around the clock to “dumb down” the units.

“We have to dumb them down,” a technician said. “You don’t judge a donkey and a racehorse by the same criteria.”

Public service unions are confident that the trials will demonstrate that their members are working flat out. They are also confident that all public service sick days are genuine and that shopping trips and cinema outings are a legitimate form of treatement for a wide variety of ailments.

Mr Lenihan ordered the review as part of his preparation for December’s budget. However, although a team of forensic accountants dedicated six months to the task they could not find any trace of benefit arising from the efforts of any state agency.

“We looked at Fas, we looked at the Health Service Executive, we looked at everything. If any good had come of any of these agencies we would have found it,” a spokesman said.

“The cost benefit analysis formula is useless if there is no benefit to measure cost against. This is clearly a flaw in the cost benefit analysis formula and does not reflect in any way on the work of this country’s dedicated state agencies,” a senior civil servant said.

“Our members have been dedicated public servants all their lives,” a source said. “What happens if they take early retirement or redundancy and then seek employment in the private sector? What chance would they have?”

“We are talking about people who may have no notion of productivity. It would be reckless for anyone to employ them.”

He said the union understood that the economy was in crisis and would engage with the government if these work experience schemes were established.

He said it wasn’t beyond all possibility that some public servants could adapt to life in the private sector. “They have to be given a chance. We want to see our members gently exposed to work under adult supervision. A team of psychologists would monitor the outcome and their input would form the basis of decisions on who should take redundancy.”

“Those who perform well would be encouraged to leave the public service while those who struggle with the work concept will be encouraged to stay,” he concluded.

“Because of the boom years we don’t have up to date analysis of the effects of long term unemployment but we are aware of the likely increase in depression, anxiety, despondency, inertia low self esteem and listlessness,” a HSE spokesperson said.

“We have run into a stumbling block in that we don’t yet have enough long term unemployed people yet to base a study on but we have reached the conclusion that we can overcome this problem by using public servants as a stand-in for the study group,” she added.

“All indications suggest that the typical profile of someone who has been in the public service for several years and somebody who has been unemployed for a like period would be quite interchangeable. We are lucky to have this valuable resource to base our studies on.”