| Public Service Levy
Posted: 2/3/2009 5:54:40 PM | I thought the following was a very good take on todays announcement:
IRELAND’S EXCHEQUER CUTS
3 FEBRUARY, 2009
Today, following the failure of the Social Partners to agree details
of pay cuts, the government announced a pensions levy on the
salaries of all public service employees. This will work out on
average at about an extra 7.5% deduction, though higher-paid
workers will pay higher percentages.
Now, ninety per cent of a large number is still a large number, and a
top civil servant, who was formerly earning 250 thousand, will no
doubt be able to struggle by somehow on the remaining 225
thousand. But I’m not that interested in highly-paid people who can
look after themselves. You see, at the other end of the scale, a
reduction in a small number produces an even smaller number and
I’m wondering this: what about the street-sweepers? Or the road
labourers? Or the junior clerk who checks your books out of the
library? These are the members of the working poor, and they are
not the ones who brought about the current financial crisis in
Ireland.
These are not the people who stupidly remortgaged their homes to
buy apartments in Bulgaria. These are not the people who took out
mortgages greater than the value of their house so that they could
buy fancy cars. These are not the ones who squirreled away €120
million in secret loans, discrediting and destabilising the banking
system in the process. These are far from Masters of the Universe.
While a top health service administrator might have to economise,
the cuts in his salary are only biting into fat, but cuts at the bottom
end of the scale are eating into bone. It costs the same to heat a
poor man’s house as it does to heat a rich man’s and there are many
families in this country without any room at all to economise because
they simply don’t have luxuries to give up.
Higher on the salary scale a little bit, you’ve seen me writing here
about nurses’ pay in the past. I think these people have been
disgracefully treated, patronised, bullied and intimidated into
covering for the shortcomings of a failed, misconceived health
structure. They’ve been exposed to moral blackmail in order to prop
up a disastrously inefficient administrative tangle. And now these
people will be demonised and blamed for the financial
mismanagement of this country, which was created by this appalling
government and its cronies in the banks and the construction
industry. I could make similar points in defence of
firefighters, paramedics or even our police, much though I’ve
criticised them in the past.
I won’t call what happened in Ireland an unholy alliance. I’ll call it
what it was: a criminal conspiracy to bleed this country dry. It
worked, and now we need scapegoats, but we won’t be blaming the
red-nosed, drooling builders in the Fianna Fáil money-tent at the
Galway races. Nor will we be blaming these same politicians who
presided year by year over unprecedented exchequer returns, and
who refused to acknowledge the reality of the bubble these returns
were based on, in case it hurt their builder buddies and interrupted
the kickbacks. Nor will we be blaming the bankers who shovelled out
110% loans to fools and collected their fat bonuses in return. No
indeed. We won’t be blaming those who run our banks and who
should right now be in jail but who, instead, are being given the
pensions of street sweepers and nurses to bail them out. We need
scapegoats, so let’s blame people like firemen, police,
paramedics, nurses, junior doctors, library assistants, street
cleaners, home helps and all the other high rollers.
And while we’re at it, let’s blame the workers in places like Waterford
Crystal, and Dell, and Banta for getting a living wage. Let’s accuse
them of greed.
But let’s say nothing about our Prime Minister who pays himself more
than the President of the USA, or the hospital consultants who keep
our health service in a money-making stranglehold, aided and
abetted by their ideological allies, the PDs. Nor should we say
anything about these Tribunal lawyers who demanded and got €2000
per day and who were given the right to decide how long the
tribunals would go on, and how much waffling they chose to do, at
€2000 per day. Let’s not talk about that. And let’s not blame a
government that spent €50 million on an unworkable
electronic voting system, or €200 million on an IT system for the
health service that didn’t work. Small money, as Minister Noel
Dempsey might have remarked.
And let’s not ask energy multinationals to pay anything for our
natural gas reserves, but instead let’s deploy 200 policemen to beat
protesters out of the road.
And let’s not ask why this government gave away our national
telecommunications network for half nothing to an asset stripper,
leaving us helpless to introduce effective broadband at a time when
we vitally need it.
And let’s not ask clerical sex abusers to pick up the billion-euro tab
for compensating their victims, or make them sell their lands or their
gold or their art treasures. No indeed. Instead let the taxpayer
come up with the money.
This country is full of self-serving cabals, secret societies and vested
interests who have held it by the throat since its birth. For a while,
many ordinary workers naively bought into a dream, actively
promoted by this government, that they might somehow share in the
riches controlled by these small groups, these few elite families,
these anointed. And the fools went and mortgaged their houses,
bought their Spanish villas and convinced themselves they were high
rollers too, until reality came crashing down on them as it had to in
the end when the upside-down pyramid toppled over.
And now, they’re losing their jobs. They’re losing their houses.
They’re losing their minds.
But let’s not blame the millionaires, or the billionaires, the bankers,
the lawyers or the political apes who decided the direction of our
economy and who poured away ten years of unimaginable
prosperity, cynically purchasing one election after another.
No. Let’s not look in that direction. Instead, let’s pin the blame on
the nurses and the teachers and the firemen. Let’s stick it to the
factory workers and the shop assistants.
The b*****ds. | |
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