What recession? Just look at how politicians and officials rip you off

THE essence of leadership is good example. The Government is suggesting that people should hold the line and forget about wage increases.

It does not take an economist to realise that the economy is going sour. Anyone old enough to remember the 1980s can recall when our economy was one of the basket cases of Europe.

We simply cannot go on living at the rate at which we are going. RTÉ had a programme recently on our highest earners and one person actually made more than €1 billion last year.

Next year will mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War and three insightful new books have already been published in recent weeks on Irish involvement. In Guarding Neutrality, Michael Kennedy suggests Eamon de Valera based Irish neutrality on the issue of sovereignty. By staying out of the war, this country finally demonstrated it was actually independent.

Winston Churchill fulminated throughout the conflict that we had no right to be neutral. Of course, de Valera’s goal was never neutrality. He was just trying to keep the country out of the conflict. Many people would probably consider that his finest achievement.

Neutrality has become an article of faith for some while other trendy elements have tried to depict the Long Fellow as a kind of malignant ogre who turned this country into a backward, priest-ridden bog in which the chief export was people. Even if he did keep the country out of the Second World War, those people like to suggest he also tried to keep the country out of the 20th century.

While I happen to believe he was grossly wrong about the 1921 treaty and criminally irresponsible in relation to events leading to the civil war, he did nevertheless provide excellent leadership in other areas, especially in his foreign policy during the 1930s when his forthright policies more than justified his subsequent decision to keep the country out of the Second World War.

De Valera also deserves credit for helping to preserve democracy during a period in which most of the Catholic countries of Europe went fascist. Moreover, he played a major role in taking the gun out of 26-county politics.

The current Government would do well to examine the kind of leadership the Long Fellow provided. When he came to power with Fianna Fáil in 1932, the world was in the grip of the Great Depression. His government was faced with spending cuts.

One of his first acts was to cut his own salary by 40% from £2,500 to £1,500 a year and he cut the other ministerial salaries by one-third, from £1,500 to £1,000 a year. He recognised that the salaries were incongruous when the people they were serving were plagued by unemployment and deprivation. He and his ministers provided real leadership.

In the 1960s when Charlie Haughey, as Minister for Finance, accorded a massive salary increase to politicians, de Valera, then President, asked that his salary should not be increased.

As he approached retirement in 1973, the President’s salary was still the same as it had been when the office was set up in 1937. Dev, then in his 90s, was worried about his pension, which would only be £1,200 to support himself and his wife in nursing homes.

At his behest his pension was raised to £5,706. Compared with the €112,000 that Mary Robinson enjoys without serving even one full term, de Valera’s pension was a paltry sum after two full terms as President and more than 40 years as a member of the Dáil.

Now when we are being told to cut back, what kind of leadership are we getting? Within the last week we had the disclosure that the Government paid €220,000 to refurnish Bertie Ahern’s new office. No structural repairs were necessary — that was for cleaning, renovating the rooms and providing new furniture.

Poor Bertie had to move out of his office when he stepped down as Taoiseach. Are all TDs entitled to spend that kind of money on their offices? If not, why not?

Are backbench ex-Taoisigh entitled to special treatment like some kind of republican royalty? Bertie used to present himself as the plain, common man who liked nothing better than going to a match or enjoying a pint with friends.

Could somebody please tell me how anyone could spend that kind of money on refurnishing an office? Well, maybe it’s easy if you are spending somebody else’s money and you don’t give a damn.

The day before the Government announced that spending cuts of €500m are to be imposed in the second half of this year, the politicians gave civil servants an increase in expenses varying from 1% to 4%. This is an example of rip-off leadership.

A member of the Oireachtas who has to travel more than 15 miles to Leinster House is entitled to overnight expenses of €144.45 and they get that money whether they incur any costs or not. It really amounts to a tax-free supplement to their income. That might sound unfair to those members who live within 15 miles of Leinster House. Well, they are paid €61.53 a day to compensate them because they can’t claim overnight expenses. All of that is tax-free, too. A public servant who has to travel more than 30 miles from home or office is entitled to €145.32 per night unvouched expenses. In other words, they get the money whether they actually incurred any expenses at all. There was a time if you had to cycle or go that far by horse, one might understand the necessity of an overnight stay, but in this day and age this tax scam is a political perversion.

PUBLIC servants also get a travel allowance amounting to a fraction over €1.26 per mile for up to 4,000 miles and 61 cent per mile after that. Politicians get paid that mileage from their homes to Leinster House no matter how they travel — even if they travel in a car pool or by train and public transport and happen to be eligible for free travel.

In many families both husband and wife have to work to help pay off a large mortgage. One, or even both, of them may have to travel 40 or 50 miles to work. They get no overnight allowance and nobody pays them any travelling expenses.

People in such circumstances have to pay full tax on their salaries and they cannot even claim the actual cost of their travel to and from work off their earnings for tax purposes. In reality their actual earnings are so much less when the cost of travel is taken into consideration.

That whole thing is grossly unfair, especially when the politicians pay themselves more than three times their actual costs and get that excess tax-free. It is a distorted example of one system for the privileged few and another for the exploited many. It is a perversion of true republicanism.

In a republic citizens are supposed to be equal under the law, but we have the disgraceful situation in which members of the Government afford themselves privileges denied to everyone else. They give themselves pensions after just two years in office. They draw those pensions immediately, without having to retire, while everybody else must quit a particular job before getting a pension from the State.

It is time for our politicians to be held accountable for their behaviour. Let’s face it — they’ve been giving lousy example.