Let’s be in no doubt: The public service didn’t cause the recession

The man with the sandbags is one of them. He works for Fingal County Council.

After my house got flooded and the rotted carpet was rolled up in the back garden for the insurance man to inspect, I contacted the local authority, explaining that next time the climate change monsoon hit, I’d like to keep some of the water out, because the insurance company might not be happy about recurring soddenness. Oh, they said, light dawning. You need sandbags. We’ll give you sandbags.

They did, too. Free, gratis and for nothing. The man arrived the day after the phone call. On time. He left the sandbags in a neat pile where he’d been asked to leave them and went off to rescue somebody else. He didn’t look for a tip and he didn’t present one of those idiotic questionnaires inviting me to rate his service on a scale of one to five. He just did the job right.

Yet he’s one of the people being rubbished, constantly, by political parties and commentators at the moment. He’s part of the public service that so badly needs reformation. If I was him, I’d be in a state of seriously ingrown resentment.

The public service didn’t cause the recession. The private sector caused the recession. Let’s be in no doubt about that. Nor did sub-prime lending in the United States cause the recession. It undoubtedly contributed to Ireland’s economic meltdown, but the fact is that sub-prime lending here in our own fair land contributed significantly to our present disaster.

People borrowed multiples of their incomes, encouraged by all the received wisdom, to buy, in some cases, houses a lot smaller and built to lower standards than the council houses of the ’60s and ’70s. They got letters from their employers indicating they were earning more than they really were earning, buoyed up by the confident private sector cliches. You know the ones that say “Buy land, they’re not making any more of it,” or “Yes, equities have gone down, but they always come back up.” The financial institutions were egging to lend everybody money, and the fact that people had to pay stamp duty (which their parents and grandparents had divvied up without a whinge) became an affront to their human dignity, despite the fact that they were earning good money, eating out twice a week and buying Prada handbags.

Blame the banks. Blame the Government. Blame whoever you want, but you can’t blame the public service for any of the causative craziness of the last decade. If anything, the public service, or some aspects of it, tried to hold back the headlong, lemming-like rush to insolvency. It was the local authorities which got in the way of people planning to build once-off houses in rural areas by voicing concerns about pollution of the water table.

Yet now we’re in Negative Equity country, with the unemployment rates going up faster than a flood and company owners talking of four and three day weeks or 20% salary cuts, the pointy end of blame has turned to face the public service, and the imperative seems to be to increase unemployment rates by turfing every second public servant out on their ear.

I don’t get it. I really don’t get it. I don’t get it as either cause or possible solution.

First of all, we may have more people in the public service than many other countries do, but that, of itself, didn’t unbalance our economy. Something like 83c out of every euro, in recent times, went directly or indirectly into construction. That leaves relatively small monies going into the public service.

Secondly, the public service is vast and diverse. Some of it works superbly. Some of it is ropy. Let’s differentiate. It isn’t fair or acceptable to smear a huge swatch of the people of Ireland simply because of the source of their salary cheque. We wouldn’t be allowed to do it if the point of commonality were race or religion or gender.

And what’s with this nonsense that because public servants are permanent and pensionable, they should have to work harder and better than us brave pioneers out in the real world of competitive industry? Yes, they’re permanent and pensionable. But a good number of them, by the nature of aspects of the public service, are also enmeshed in a deadly recurring pattern of routine responsibilities that would bend the mind with their capacity to bore. Anybody in a boring job should be paid MUCH more than someone in an exciting, varied, challenging job, if for no other reason than to compensate them for the health risks they run.

Boredom contributes to many of the problems, whether those problems are high blood pressure, obesity or alcoholism, which beset working people. It may not be a metaphor when you describe your work as likely to bore you to death, since — in a boring job — you have a greatly increased chance of cardiovascular illness, gastrointestinal disorders and stress-related absences from work. In Sweden, six out of 10 workers in a particularly routine and repetitive job suffered peptic ulcers at a level way above the likely occurrence in people who weren’t bored.

In addition, the fact that you can’t be fired and that you get a pension has to be measured against the more lively benefits of on-site gyms and crèches provided by some of the big multinational employers.

The other pointless drivel brought into the public service reform discussion is that it’s OK to have nurses and gardaí, but nobody should have administrators.

The regular cry for the elimination, nay, extermination of administrators is about as logical as suggesting we do away with engineers. Without engineers, nothing will flow to the water taps in a house. Without engineers, bridges would fall over.

Administrators serve a parallel function. Without them, you would not get your free fuel as a pensioner or the tax disc for your car. You know those An Post ads where they promise to get your new passport to you almost before you apply for it? Yeah. The ones who deliver on the promise are those bad guys called administrators.

The public service is mired in traditions that have never been consistently challenged by any government. It’s clogged by European Union employment law, appeals processes and excuses for stress leave. It’s neck-deep in regulations so determined to achieve equality, they make everything unequal. It goes unrewarded for cutting out paperwork or delivering particularly good service.

With all of its problems, it still keeps the water coming out of the taps, the lightbulbs coming on and the fire brigade arriving when your chimney loses the run of itself. Some areas — notably the Revenue Commissioners — manage to be ruthless as hell but remarkably pleasant while they’re about it.

Treating the public service as one big entity requiring a bloody nose to teach it to stop causing recessions is as daft as George Bush trying to distract from his failure to catch one guy in a tent by killing thousands of unconnected other people.