Recovery programme - Plan must be honest and equitable

SO, the day of reckoning is at hand. If all goes as promised we will, sometime in the next few hours, find out if we are governed by people with real leadership skills, with the vision and the sense of urgency required to stop the haemorrhaging of public finances; an objective central to restoring our economy and our shattered confidence.

Our squandered reputation as a safe, sane and attractive place to invest will either begin to recover today or slip further down the not-with-a-barge-pole league table. It all depends on what is proposed in the recovery programme. But something much greater, something much more important, is in play as well.

Today Taoiseach Brian Cowen will show if he values social unity more than he dreads the prospect of industrial unrest in the public sector.

Today the 1,900 Dell workers; those at Tara Mines; the workers at Bausch and Lomb who have taken a 25% pay cut to try to save their jobs; the hundreds of car component workers laid off at Kostal; the tens of thousands of construction workers who have seen jobs disappear like melting snow; the Ulster Bank workers and the Waterford Crystal workers left without jobs or pensions; the thousands of others who lost jobs in small firms without fanfare or publicity; and all of those worried about pay cuts and job security will know if they are just bit players in a society where there is one law for the public service and another far more brutal one for private sector workers.

No matter how trade union leaders vent their spleen about taxing “trophy houses” and no matter that they refuse to discuss “core pay”, today is the day we will know whether we are all in this mess together or not.

We can only hope that the package is proportionate, fair, inclusive, and, despite everything, in some way uplifting. We must hope that it will save vast sums because we can’t continue to borrow €55 million every 24 hours to pay our housekeeping bills. We must hope the proposals unite rather than divide, as not even the most delusional can imagine that today’s announcement is any more that the opening lines of a do-or-die epic.

It would be wonderful to believe that all of these things are possible but the portents are not good. The Taoiseach has invested considerable political and personal capital by insisting that social partnership has earned the right to be the first port of call on any journey towards recovery. Fair enough, but huge numbers of workers have no more connection with “social partnership” than they do with Sendero Luminoso. For most workers in the private sector “social partnership” has come to represent a private, self-serving club dedicated to the protection of privilege and the denial of reality that reached its great high watermark with Bertie Ahern’s benchmarking fraud.

These charges will rankle with public servants but the figures are irrefutable and unless today’s package moves to address that terrible imbalance we are in for a much more difficult time than it need or should be.

Yes the rich must pay more, yes the weak and vulnerable must be protected, but unless the proposals are based on honesty and fairness they will not suffice.

We just cannot afford that failure.