Minimum wage calls made at school dedicated to working class champion

IF Dr Peter Bacon and Finance Minister Brian Lenihan felt no sense of shame in seeking to undermine minimum wage protection, they might at least have had a sense of occasion at the bitter irony of making such statements at a summer school dedicated to the memory of Patrick MacGill, that “graduate” of Ulster’s hiring fairs and Scotland’s navvy camps.

The school’s own website boasts how “as organised labour was becoming a force in the land, here was a powerful voice on behalf of the working class” who had himself shared its hardships, and it expresses pride in MacGill’s “relentless criticism of the local merchant, the gombeen man”.

MacGill would have been more appreciative of an observation by Minister Lenihan on June 25 that “the availability of cheap labour after 2004” had been a key factor in bringing about our economic crisis.