Public finances - If Taoiseach backs down he must go

SO this is what it feels like to be stuck in a car careering towards the edge of a cliff.

This what it feels like to wonder if the driver has the skills and courage to avoid a fatal crash. This is what it is like when self-interest begins to cloud decision-making.

Even more frighteningly, this is what it is like when the driver may be about to lose his nerve and give up the fight before it really begins.

In recent days Taoiseach Brian Cowen has said: “The Government is anxious to work with the public service unions to identify measures... which would enable costs to be reduced without reducing pay rates.”

If Mr Cowen thinks we can save this country without cutting public pay then all of the optimism surrounding his appointment, regretfully, will have to be seen as little more than a continuation of the delusion that shaped his predecessor’s premiership.

If he suggests, as has been reported, that Brian Lenihan renege on his promise on excluding tax increases from the December budget – other than a carbon tax or a new top income rate – he will have confirmed he does not have the stomach for the job.

He will have confirmed that all his promises of public sector and government reform were just high-stool blather. Cynical posturing ticking the boxes of public discourse but without real intention or meaning.

He will have confirmed what all of those who point to his record as Ahern’s finance minister have argued, that he is more part of the problem than part of the solution. Mr Cowen is not alone though.

Yesterday, despite repeated opportunities, Labour’s Joan Burton refused to grasp the public pay nettle. Speaking on RTÉ she stopped just short of exchanging Christmas cake recipes rather than accept the obvious. This leaves Labour under a cloud and indicates they have not accepted the realities facing us all.

No one wants to see anyone’s pay cut. No one wants to see entirely normal ambitions undermined but at this moment no other viable solution has been put forward. This is not as it should be but it is how it is.

It seems likely that we are about to face into a period of pointless industrial unrest; pointless in that the country will be just as broke on the morning after the strikes as it was on the morning of the strikes.

It might be possible to avert this if some of the indulgences of the Ahern-McCreevey-Harney-Cowen era were reversed. Why not, in the interest of fairness, tell anyone paid out of the public purse, everyone from primary school teachers to RTÉ’s grossly overpaid entertainers, from all the junior clerical officers to the €250,000-plus a year hospital consultants that from January 1, €150,000 is the every top of the scale for all of them for the next few years. If they want to leave, fine, after all €150,000 would represent a significant pay rise for most European hospital consultants.

Cuts are inevitable but unless we accept that this golden circle earning bizarre sums from the public purse – and many union leaders can give example here too – are returned to sane levels of pay then we can expect great but avoidable social unrest.

That is why Mr Cowen cannot back down.