Union threats - We cannot afford strikes in this crisis

THE coming weeks, before Brian Lenihan publishes his budget, will play a very large part in defining this country’s immediate and medium-term future.

Government and trade union policies will decide whether we retain what is left of our economic independence or whether, after less than a century of self governance, we become a colony again.

If we cannot accept the reality of the crisis swamping us we will not be, as we were before, ruled from Dublin Castle or the Vice Regal Lodge, but from some relatively minor back office at the International Monetary Fund headquarters on 19th Street in Washington, DC.

This is a consequence of borrowing €1 billion more or less every 20 days and refusing to countenance the urgency or lethal momentum of our situation.

We have known for almost two years that this awful point would be reached. In the interim we huffed and puffed hoping things were not as bad as they were.

Delusion had worked before, why not again?

We watched Iceland stagger towards anarchy as its economy collapsed but never imagined that those events had, or might have, any relevance for us.

We must assume that, in those two years, Taoiseach Brian Cowen and his advisors considered every option before accepting that spending would have to fall.

Such a conservative politician, so dedicated to his party’s creedo of retaining power at all costs, would not jeopardise Fianna Fáil’s hegemony unless there absolutely was no alternative. He is profoundly aware of his party’s electoral prospects but cutting public spending would extinguish any remaining hope of a rout rather than a massacre at the next election.

For the last while Mr Cowen has insisted on what was once unutterable — he has insisted that no element of public spending is untouchable. His ministers have been even more forthright. Yet, before anything is finalised or much less announced public sector unions are on a war footing. They ave marshalled their forces to intimidate a country already on its knees.

Yesterday, IMPACT became the first major public service union to ballot in favour of industrial unrest if pay is cut. Other public service unions are balloting on strike proposals but, it is believed, union leaders have earmarked November 24 for a 24-hour strike.

At this point in any process it is usual to adopt extreme positions before reaching a compromise. But what is deeply worrying, and becoming more so by the day, is that our circumstances are a long, long way from those happy, spend-away days when social partnership was lubricated by the blandishments and concessions that characterised the Ahern catastrophe.

Different, much harder rules apply now.

Union leaders have great responsibilities, primarily to their members but at some points in history those responsibilities are wider. We are at that point now. If the public sector unions continue to imagine that we can spend what we do not have we are doomed. If they put their own interests before everyone else’s we are doomed. If they do not show the kind of leadership we demanded of our politicians, that they put national interests before party or union interests, we are doomed.

Surely, if Bertie Ahern’s finance minister can see that the old way of doing things offers us no future then the public sector unions and their leaders can too.

This insane posturing has the capacity to ruin us all.