Let’s all pull together — not pull our community apart in a time of crisis

By Fergus Finlay

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

The line is from Casablanca, of course, and that movie was about a time when the world was even crazier than it is now.

But it was the Second World War. I wonder has there ever been a time of peace when the world — at least our little bit of the world — was crazier than it is right now? But that phrase about stuff not amounting to a hill of beans was the thing that kept going through my head all week. Especially when I read the detail of the Government’s big announcement about public service reform. Sixty-six pages of content about the ending of decentralisation projects, the elimination of so-called "quangos" and the restructuring of the civil and public services to do more with less. And it was really hard to find a hill of beans at the end of it.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a strategy, and it’s all good stuff (well, most of it was good stuff — if I had the time I’d argue the toss about some of the quango decisions). It will deliver the goods if it’s implemented, and there’s a pretty detailed implementation plan. By the time it’s done we should have a greatly streamlined, and hopefully more citizen-focused, public service. It’s a decent strategic plan, worth keeping an eye on as it’s happening.

But it’s about tomorrow. It might change things tomorrow, and it might even save some money tomorrow. Not a lot, to be honest — some of the proposals about shared services might save tens of thousands of euro at a time when we need to be talking about hundreds of millions. But still, sometime tomorrow it should deliver better public services, and hopefully better public service.

I’m all in favour of strategy. It’s good stuff, strategy. No organisation can grow unless it stops every now and again and looks over the parapet. Strategy is about what might be, if we do it right. And if we do it right together.

But wasn’t it former US President Lyndon Johnson who once said: "When you are up to your ass in alligators, it can be difficult to remind yourself that your initial objective was to redesign the swamp?"

Has there ever been a time when we have been more up to our collective asses in alligators? So why are we pretending that solutions designed to yield modest efficiencies in the medium term are some kind of answer to the predicament we are in? The real meat of the Government’s public service reform package is in the range of proposals designed to reduce the number of public servants over time. But while we’re all sitting around thinking "that might be tough, but it makes sense", the government has still nothing to say on the one thing that could make an immediate impact on the public service payroll.

Yes, I’m back to the subject of increments. We want to — we have to — control the growth of the public service payroll. But we’re going to spend a minimum of €300 million giving an entirely unnecessary pay increase to tens of thousands of public servants next year.

And because we have to pay for that, we are, according to the latest leaks, going to cut child benefit by €10 per child. That cut will hurt every family in Ireland – especially those families that are paying for hugely expensive childcare. But it could have devastating consequences for the poorest families in Ireland.

And that’s not all. I’ve already written here about the decision of the HSE to evict elderly women, frail women in their 90s, from their homes. I’m aware of other HSE decisions that will have equally damaging social consequences. Some of these decisions lack basic morality.

We have to figure out what our bottom lines are, and we have to do it now. And we can’t pretend that there is some over-arching strategy that will solve all the moral dilemmas. We have to figure out where the threshold of decency is.

I know my bottom lines, about some of the issues that have come up recently. I’m totally opposed to child benefit cuts, but I’m prepared to live with them provide every low income family is protected. If a cut in child benefit means the struggle is greater, that’s desperate. But if a cut in child benefit means a child goes hungry, or can’t be kept warm, that’s unacceptable. And that’s fixable, even while some money is being saved.

If we can’t afford a special needs assistant for every child who needs one, that’s appalling. But we could redesign the system, so that every school has a reasonable and sustainable complement of assistants to help the whole school to cope. And if we’re not prepared to sit down and do that — the system in consultation with the schools and the parents — that’s unacceptable.

And I feel exactly the same way about, for example, increases in the cost to an individual of third-level education. I believe in free education, and I’ve argued for years about the benefits of access to third level. But if we can’t sustain the system without a modest increase in the contribution, we all have to live with that. If we can’t find a way to support the student who really can’t cope with that increase, that’s unacceptable.

I’ve read all the arguments about the economic and social impact of the proposed 2% VAT increase. I can see precisely how it could do damage, and make life more difficult to live for a lot of people. But for me anyway, there isn’t the same bottom line issue about that. It’ll be tough, but we’ll all live through it.

And that’s how I feel about public service pay increments. It’s a wage increase we can’t afford, a pay sacrifice that’s not too big to ask. And it would yield savings now — the kind of savings that would prevent us having to cross moral thresholds. Evicting frail elderly women from their homes; forcing children to go hungry; robbing people of their dignity or increasing real vulnerabilities — they have to be beyond the last resort.

In all the letters and emails I’ve received about the increments, the one argument that keeps being put forward in defence of the increments is the Croke Park agreement. But I’ve read that too — the Public Service Agreement 2010–2014 as it’s called. Its 83 pages have more than 20,000 words, and not one of them is a commitment to preserve pay increments. Yes, it talks about no compulsory redundancies and no more pay cuts except in extreme circumstances. But nowhere does it promise wage increases and that’s something the public service unions have signed up to.

The leadership to encourage shared sacrifice. The imagination to devise new ways of getting results. A strong sense of what’s right and what’s not right. An absolute determination to put politics to one side, and the country and its people centre stage. We can still pull together through the crisis. We must not pull our community apart.

This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Tuesday, November 22, 2011