Fair play demands that all sectors share the pain

WHAT value union representation?

Some time ago Peter McLoone of IMPACT clearly signalled a pension levy on public servants.Accordingly, it was very convenient formally to introduce it to the social partners at a very late hour thereby enabling the union representatives to “collapse” the talks and be seen by their members as resisting the levy. What hypocrisy!

If the Government is interested in real fairness the pension levy must also apply to politicians and changes must be made to their superannuation scheme.

In the last benchmarking report, Dáil deputies’ pay was directly linked to that of principal officers in the civil service.

However, those civil servants, like all other civil servants, can take the pension merited by years of service only on reaching their 60th birthday. Should they retire before that their pension is abated.

Politicians have a much more favourable scheme in that if they lose office they become immediately entitled to a pension irrespective of age and the span of service for full pension entitlement is very short, relatively speaking. To achieve fairness, each sector of the community must pay their just taxes.

One lesson to be learned from the last recession was that some in the private sector engaged in various tax evasion devices resulting in €2.4 billion being collected by the Revenue Commissioners from the recent investigations.

Yet the Taoiseach failed to make any reference to tax evasion in his statement. Why?

Finally, it is only appropriate that congratulations should be extended to the real minister for finance, Turlough O’Sullivan of IBEC. Public servants, beware, there is more pain on the way. Perhaps the next move will be to reduce the public service pay bill by abolishing much of the civil service and allowing IBEC make payments to its members under the multitude of grant schemes available to them without any scrutiny. Straightforward really, isn’t it?

Tony MacCarthaigh

18 Beech Park Ave

Foxrock

Dublin 18