Let’s get real, Taoiseach: scorch the junior ranks and abolish the Seanad

I SAW Ceann Comhairle John O’Donoghue on the news the other night, talking about the members of the Oireachtas feeling pain and yet being determined to give a lead.

There was a strong sense in everything he said that members of the Dáil and Seanad were suffering and yet, in their nobility, were prepared to suffer more. They were offering up a cut of 10% in their expenses as a mark of solidarity with the tens of thousands who were losing their jobs and the hundreds of thousands facing a year or more of poverty.

And all I could think, watching him, was “give me a break”. Our TDs are used to five-year terms now — they’d be horrified, all of them, if we ever returned to previous times when the average Dáil term was around three years. A typical TD will earn, between salary and expenses, about €750,000 in a five-year term. TDs who have been there, without ever holding ministerial office, since Bertie Ahern was first elected Taoiseach, will have earned not far short of €2 million in that time.

Yes, they work hard. Yes, they’re decent people, on the whole. Yes, it is important that the salary for the job enables and encourages people of calibre to devote themselves full-time to politics.

But our leaders just don’t get it, do they? I was determined to march on Saturday last before I heard that interview, and doubly so afterwards.

And something really important happened on that march. It might have been conceived as a protest by public servants against an unfair and one-sided levy, but it turned into a demand for fairness.

I met nobody on that march who wasn’t willing to make a sacrifice. I met nobody who didn’t recognise how serious our situation is. But again and again I met people who were genuinely angry at how unfairly the burden of adjustment is being applied.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that when 100,000 people march through the capital city — elderly people, mothers pushing buggies, students — that they represent a lot more than just themselves. What our Government was seeing — if they were watching — was the voice of the entire people. And there were no mixed messages. The mood was coherent and determined. The message was clear: sacrifice, if it is to be truly shared, must start at the top.

Bankers are one thing — and I have to tell you that no one marching through Dublin last Saturday could understand the apparent reluctance of the Government to “out” the gilded few involved in banking shenanigans. The endless references to “due process” cut very little ice when everyone who thinks about it knows that naming people who were offered a loan to buy shares at no real risk to themselves cannot possibly prejudice anything.

But if bankers are one thing, leadership is another. If our leaders really believe they are sharing the pain and demonstrating a willingness to remove some of the padding from their own situations, they’re kidding themselves.

And now I run the risk of repeating myself. I wrote here a few weeks ago that all during the Second World War (a time when the nation was at risk if ever there was one) the country was run by a cabinet of 11 and six junior ministers.

Now we have junior ministers (many of whom we wouldn’t recognise if we met them in the street) for every piddling, tuppence-halfpenny function you can think of. It takes more than twice as many office-holders, paid many multiples of what office-holders were paid then, to run the country now as it did when we were on the edges of a world war.

And despite that, we don’t have ministers to do some of the really important things that need to be done now.

If we were really hellbent on working our way out of this trouble, individual minsters would carry direct accountability for the development of a new economic programme, for measures to attack our competitiveness, for social cohesion, for regional development (especially for Dublin).

If we were really serious, the Taoiseach would be trimming his cabinet, scorching the ranks of junior ministers and making all of them work twice as hard and account for what they did on a daily basis.

Let’s face it, the opinion polls and the mood you encounter everywhere you go all say one thing — that this Government will not be returned at the next election. The principal reason is because everyone regards them as being totally out of touch with what the country really needs.

If they are to have any chance of recovering their reputations, they need now to rediscover a sense of vocation about politics and public service and to forget forever the thought that they’re all in it for cushy careers.

That applies to Dáil Éireann, too. We have 166 TDs — on the strict application of the limits contained in the constitution, that’s exactly 25 more than we need. The kind of reforms that would trim the numbers,and turn the Dáil into a real legislative and public interest assembly, are long overdue. But they could be put through in a couple of months if the will was there. And then, God help us, there’s the Seanad. We have 61 senators. They were off duty for three out of every four days last year — adjourned for 283 of the 366 days in our most recent leap year. Yet they cost between €10m and €11m directly — and about twice that again indirectly.

They are, by and large, part-time part-timers. According to the most recent register of members’ interests, published last April, 18 of the 61 record themselves as having no other income.

But many of them — the 18 who draw no other salary — are on leave from other jobs, or have put other sources of income to one side for the moment.

WITH very few exceptions, they are entirely anonymous. They’re all honourable, decent and able people, no doubt, but I doubt if there is a single citizen in Ireland who could name more than 10 of them without difficulty.

And I suspect there isn’t a single citizen in Ireland who could tell you what they do when they do meet.

According the Houses of the Oireachtas website, “a typical working day for a senator involves researching and preparing speeches for debates on social, economic and financial issues, drafting amendments to bills and examining proposals for new legislation, contributing to debates on bills and other important matters, voting on issues in the House and making representations on behalf of individuals and others to Government ministers”.

That, I have to tell you, is one of the best coatings of gloss I’ve ever seen on a pretty rickety piece of furniture.

It’s time for the Seanad to go, in its entirety, and for a fresh start to be made to the whole business and practice of politics. Leading from the top requires real pain, not crocodile tears. Above all, and this is the thing that politics has forgotten — leading has to be once more about serving, and nothing else.