Forget about low pay and sky-high prices, we’ll re-elect them anyway

IF Irish Ferries manages to jettison its workforce and replace it with cheaper labour, as it is so desperately trying to do, there will be widespread repercussions for workers in this country.

The company is prepared to spend €20 million on what it described as a “voluntary” redundancy package, so badly do they want to be rid of their 543 workers.

In this case, voluntary is a bit of a euphemism. They’ll get it if there’s no industrial action, or even a threat of it.

The company, on the other hand, liberally issued its own threats.

If the workers did not accept the offer, or if they had the audacity to exercise their right to strike, or even threaten it, Irish Ferries left them under no illusion as to what would happen.

“We will have no option but to completely exit the operation of ships on the Irish Sea” - with compulsory redundancies.

As offers go, this one has all the appearance of an invitation to walk the plank while being prodded along it.

Those who decide to go will get up to six weeks pay per year of service, as well as the statutory two weeks pay.

Those who stay can look forward to the largesse of Irish Ferries stretching to as little as e3.60 per hour for the privilege of working 12-hour shifts, but the company will offer compensation packages for loss of income and time off.

Irish Ferries is a profitable company that wants to become more profitable in the future, which is generally a laudable ambition, except it wants to do so on the backs of Irish workers.

Because there are so many involved in this case, it graphically highlights the problem that workers face because of the scourge of low pay.

But it can be pointed out, even now, that many workers have already felt the impact of foreign workers getting jobs at reduced rates.

The attitude of some ruthless employers would appear to be to give the job to the Irish person - if they’re prepared to do it for the same lower rate as the non-national.

Before anybody begins to mount their high horse and accuse me of racism or xenophobia, this is not about keeping foreigners out - it’s about equal pay.

Those greedy bosses circumvent the fact that there is a minimum wage in this country. Workers are entitled to expect an officially recognised hourly rate which should apply to every worker, Irish or not.

To judge from an opinion poll this week, the Government could almost get rid of the minimum wage and get away with it.

There was a depressing inevitability in the comprehensive poll published by the Irish Examiner which looked at the performance of our political parties and the attitude of the electorate to them.

The dreary conclusion in the poll was that if there was a general election tomorrow morning, Fianna Fáil would be back in power.

Any morning, in fact.

The Fianna Fáil/PD coalition seems to be a parachute without which people are not prepared to take an electoral leap into the future.

Even though the poll showed the Soldiers of Destiny having lost 4% since the local and European elections last year, they were still far ahead of the major opposition parties of Fine Gael and Labour - and they were still ahead even if you were to combine the totals in favour of those two parties.

When you consider that Fianna Fáil would rather forget those elections last year, so devastating were they, you would have to ask yourself what has changed.

The answer, of course, is nothing.

Fianna Fáil didn’t forswear arrogance. Like the Jesuits, they would protest that they’re tops at humility.

In fact, there was something that created public outrage during the summer: the Eddie Hobbs factor and his televised series on Rip-Off Republic.

You would imagine there would be a backlash to that, judging from the way the viewing figures went through the roof between the first programme and the last.

Eddie Hobbs didn’t say anything new, but he said it very effectively and with great impact on national television.

One felt that if there had been a general election after his last broadcast, the Government would have been swept out of office.

One, or even two, would have been very wrong. It is extraordinary that a poll in which most people said the cost of living/rip-off Ireland was the top national issue, they would still opt for the Government they blame for much of the problem.

Considering that only 35% felt the quality of life got better in the past five years, as against the 66% who thought it stayed the same (41%) or got worse (25%), it’s even more depressing.

One clue as to why the Government would be returned to power could lie in what was at the very bottom of priorities in this poll: poverty.

Only 2% of those interviewed thought poverty in this country appalling enough to give it a first mention, although this increased to 7% in total.

But it was still bottom of the list, coming after oil prices and corruption.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, by his own admission, puts a lot of faith in what Prof Robert Putnam of Harvard University has to say.

Bertie is so enthralled that he invited the professor to be the star turn at the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party get-together in Cavan recently.

I hope the Taoiseach took in at least some of what the professor had to say because he had a message which is very pertinent to present-day Ireland, over which Bertie Ahern has presided for the past eight years.

The professor warned that Ireland was already on the same road as the US and we were in danger of losing what he termed our ‘social capital.’

What he meant by this was we could lose the high participation of people in their communities, and this could happen unless we changed the way we worked and lived.

Prof Putnam said he was speaking to the converted because he believed Bertie Ahern was now one of the best ‘social capitalists’ and a firm believer in building a sense of community and giving people better lives.

Up to then, the Taoiseach was humble enough to describe himself merely as a socialist.

But the professor elevated him to social capitalist, an appellation which would be academic as far as many people are concerned.

Apart from the fact that a social capitalist appears to be a contradiction in terms, it is certainly academic to the 66% who reckon the quality of life either got worse or stayed the same over the past five years.

Possibly, social capitalist means having the best of both worlds, in which case it could be truly applicable to our politically schizophrenic Taoiseach.