Partnership deals good for civil servants only

YOUR editorial (Irish Examiner, September 6) touched on some of the glaring inequities of the social partnership model in the Irish economy.

While these deals have been promoted as delivering stable economic development over the last 10 years, in the main they have mostly benefited permanent public sector employees rather than the private sector workers whose firms have actually generated the growth.

Undoubtedly, the early agreements assisted the average private sector PAYE worker through lower tax rates but more recent ones have almost exclusively favoured the sinecured, pensionable staff of state and semi-state bodies.

At the time of the benchmarking exercise, union representatives bleated to the media that civil servants, on average, were more highly qualified than the general working population.

If this is the case, the question should be why an over-qualified, under-utilised, unaccountable clerk deserves a higher wage than his private sector counterpart who can be two pay cheques away from a P45 and a relatively worthless defined-contribution pension.

And if we are privileged with such an erudite and educated civil service, how come so many private sector consultants are commissioned to work for their departments?

Most civil servants seem to object to decentralisation, but why haven’t we seen a massive brain-drain to the private sector. I think they are smart enough to realise, as we do, that they’ve never had it so good.

Mark Daly

Castlefield

Clonsilla

Dublin 15