Don’t make public servants scapegoats for our financial fiasco

I WAS at a party the other night. Lovely affair, generous host and hostess, plenty of food and drink (we were taking a taxi home). And not, by any means, a left-wing group, although they were all utterly charming.

Naturally, despite the conviviality of the evening, all we could talk about was the recession — how suddenly it had come upon us, how frightening it was, whose fault it was. And here’s an interesting thing. I certainly wouldn’t say that the Government’s performance throughout our current difficulties was wildly applauded by this particular social gathering — far from it, in fact. But every downturn needs a real scapegoat, it seems.

And it’s becoming clearer and clearer that for a great many ordinary, decent people, our scapegoat is going to be the public service.

You hear it everywhere: “Fat cats, every one of them. Lazy, overpaid, underworked, far too many of them. Secure jobs, guaranteed pensions, huge salaries, index-linked pensions. If we’re going to cut back, let’s cut back the public service. They have it coming.”

I was asked how many public servants there are altogether. When I said that my guess would be about 350,000, a shocked silence fell on the room (and by the way, there were a few public servants at the party too).

Wow, someone said. With that many public servants around, is it any wonder the country is going down the drain? That’s when people began to wonder aloud about how many we should get rid of. A third, said some — no — we could probably do with about half of them, said someone else.

And how much do you think we should cut their overinflated pay — 10%, 15%, 20%? More? I asked the group if they wanted to be specific about which public servants we should get rid of first. But one of the other guests said that was the wrong way to go about it. Let’s decide what we need instead, she said — then all the rest would be surplus to requirements.

Everyone agreed that was a good way to go. And then there was an almost immediate consensus that we should keep all nurses, teachers, and firemen. And doctors, that was pretty unanimous.

And the people who collect the rubbish, keep the streets clean, and make sure the streets are lit at night. No one disagreed with any of them. And when librarians were mentioned, everyone thought they were a good thing too.

There was some dispute about the people necessary to manage all that, and the people you’d need to administer it and pay the wages and so on. Maybe you could cut down on a bit of that, was the consensus, but you’d certainly need some people for management and administration.

And what about the people who clean the hospital wards, and home-helps, and school caretakers and all those people, someone asked.

Yes, of course, sure we have to have them. And we need to keep the people who pay out the old-age pensions and all the other benefits that people need.

But still, everyone at the party agreed that you could keep all them, and still be able to reduce the number of 350,000 by an awful lot.

When I got home from the party (or at least, when I was feeling a little better the following day), I decided to try to see if I could find the actual numbers, at least partly because I had no real confidence in my guess of the night before.

To my surprise, I had actually underestimated the total. According to the detailed estimates for 2008 (they haven’t got around to publishing the estimates in detail for 2009 yet) there are 369,328 public servants.

But that, it turns out, is a gross figure. The Department of Finance estimates that there are about 91,000 pensioners included in that total — so the net figure, the number of actual live public servants who make up the pay bill — is just 280,000. (I’m going to stick with the gross figure for comparison purposes, because the department doesn’t break down the total of pensioners in the areas of the public service they come from.)

The really surprising thing about that big total — 369,328 — is that about 38,000 are accounted for by the gardaí, the Prison Service, and the Defence Forces. Almost 100,000 work in education (and that doesn’t include the civil servants in the department itself), and 143,000 work in the HSE. That’s 281,000 of the 369,328 accounted for by our education, healthcare, and security needs. Three out of every four public servants, paid for out of our taxes, are responding to our most fundamental needs.

Now, I’m sure that within that total there are some people we could do without. There may even be a couple of thousand we don’t really need. But if we are to make the really deep cuts that people seem to think are possible, we’re either going to cut down hugely on some pretty basic stuff, or else we’ll have to find our public service targets elsewhere.

The Department of Foreign Affairs, maybe. There’s about 1,300 of them, all pretty expensive, what with their overseas allowances and their ambassadorial cars. However, they are the people who worked out how to bring peace to Northern Ireland, and they’re pretty active in ensuring that Ireland is extremely well represented throughout the world. We might need to look elsewhere.

What about the 6,000 people who work in the Revenue Commissioners, or the 1,000 public servants in the courts, or the 200 people who work for the DPP? We could sell the National Gallery, maybe — that would get rid of about 100 people altogether.

The truth is that it’s not as easy as it looks, is it? In fact we don’t have a bloated, overstaffed public service at all. Sure, there’s a need for reform, and probably room for some trimming. But we need our public service — and if anything, we should be acknowledging its quality.

You can work out the pay figures yourself. The public sector pay and pensions bill for that 369,328 public servants is €19.3 billion. It’s an enormous figure, for sure, but it works out at an average of €52,504 per annum as the average cost of each public servant. The cost of employing a public servant, just like the cost of employing anyone else, includes more than salary, so one can deduce easily enough that the average public service salary in Ireland is less than €50,000 a year. Perhaps not poverty, but certainly not feather-bedding either.

And we know that there are more than 40,000 public service clerical workers, not to mention schoolroom special needs assistants, who start work on a salary of €23,000 a year, which rises to less than €39,000 after 14 long years, if they last that long. I know a lot of public service workers who spend their working lives at the sharp end of the frontline, helping people who are homeless, unemployed youngsters, people with disabilities, disadvantaged kids, people with addictions, and victims of crime.

Believe me — they deserve every penny of the modest salaries they earn. And believe this too — they should be seen as heroes, and never as scapegoats.