U-turn on pay cuts - Cynicism that demeans our democracy

IT IS just possible that Taoiseach Brian Cowen and Finance Minister Brian Lenihan do not recognise the contempt for ordinary people implicit in Tuesday’s decision by Fianna Fáil’s parliamentary party not to revisit the exclusion of more than 640 senior officials from the pay cuts announced in the budget.

We raise that possibility not because we believe it might be true but because the alternative is too dispiriting. It is disturbing that these two perceptive, intelligent men are so detached. Both know how this divisive favouritism will be judged. They know it is another example of the powerful looking after the powerful because, as the party of permanent government, they have come to believe there will be no consequences. They gave two fingers to the we’re-all-in-this-together cheerleading – a call to patriotic action as Mr Lenihan earlier described it – because they knew they could.

They knew that dissent, laughably known as a backbenchers’ revolt, could be dismissed with little more than a wave of the hand. In this burlesque a debate was not even required as the motion could not find someone brave enough to second it. Rubbing salt into the wound and, as if to celebrate their own impotence, backbenchers applauded Mr Lenihan for preserving the inequity.