Bertie’s fired, tired and wired TDs ready to play fiscal musical chairs

WITH a shamelessness that would make even Katie French blush, the Taoiseach last night dangled the Dáil spoils of committee chairpersonships in front of his dazzled backbenchers.

Dancing attendance on their leader, Fianna Fáil TDs proved once and for all Oireachtas committees are not just dayrooms for the bewildered, as cynics insist — they are nice little earners too.

Mr Ahern let it be known he was keen to slap the backs of those he was forced to let go, felt sorry for or was scared of — when the plum posts are announced tomorrow, it will be the day of the fired, tired and wired.

With the health service on a frontline jobs freeze and the country on standby for a Scrooge Christmas budget, our deputies got their priorities right as they clamoured to catch the Taoiseach’s eye.

Despite most of the people who have ever come into contact with the 18 Oireachtas committees believing they number 17 too many — the forensic Public Accounts watchdog being the only one with any real bite — the taxpayer is to be delighted with the bill for three more.

This will enable the Taoiseach to find just about everyone in FF a cushy little job and a reason to be grateful to Mr Ahern should they be tempted to “do a Ned” at the next confidence vote and forget to turn up like the disgruntled Deputy O’Keeffe did last month.

The expansion doesn’t make much sense in parliamentary terms, but will make an awful lot of euros and cents for the lucky chairs who get a whopping €20,000 a year on top of their €100,000 salary, while committee deputy chairs will have to scrape by on a measly €10,000 extra.

Surprisingly, there was no dissent on the Dáil benches to this brave roll-out of the Oireachtas in action — despite the 30 grand for the two posts per body being enough to pay the starting salary for a nurse. And so the Dáil’s obscene version of musical chairs began in all its grim glory.

Are we being unfair to our selfless representatives? Well, no, as anyone who had the misfortune to sit through any of the bizarre meanderings of, say, the joint health committee in the last Oireachtas — where what someone had bought their daughter-in-law for her birthday was as likely to spark banal discussion as anything remotely related to medicine — will testify.

But who could argue with Jackie Healy-Rae getting the chairmanship of the Family and Social Affairs committee which he is set to receive?

The maverick Kerry deputy has already shown his empathy with the poor and needy by justifying his €37,000 leaders’ allowance because it paid for “the shirt on my back and the shoes on my feet”.

Surely our spunky new opposition, with its sympathy for the taxpayer and hatred of Government waste, stood up against this madness?

No. Fine Gael were bought off with the offer of doubling their party’s chairmanships to four.

The price of democracy was once said to be eternal vigilance.

Now democracy is just another version of the Price is Right.