Public servants are patriots — that’s why I think they should vote yes

GOOD enough for them, a lot of people seem to be saying.

Isn’t it about time that public service pay got squeezed? Haven’t they done very well for long enough, with their permanent jobs and their free pensions?

I’ve written here before about the amazing split that seems to dominate public discourse about public servants and what they’re worth.

A couple of years ago, it was teachers, nurses and firemen who looked on with envy as people in the private sector, especially the construction sector, were spending their bonuses on second and third properties.

It was a time when bodies like RTÉ were earning a significant portion of their advertising revenue running ads to encourage people to invest in all sorts of places. The Algarve, Bulgaria, Hungary — you name it — as long as Ryanair flew there, people were prepared to mortgage themselves to the hilt to buy apartments in the sun.

That’s all gone now. There are thousands of people all over the country now who are saddled with mortgages for places they’re never going to see again. They lie awake at night wondering how they’re going to cope as interest rates start to rise — especially if their jobs are shaky.

And for some reason, people who work in the public service seem to have become part of the scapegoat for the anger felt by the rest of the population.

It’s entirely unfair. It wasn’t the public service that caused the mess we’re in. It wasn’t the public service that indulged in an orgy of spending and borrowing. It wasn’t the public service that created the ideological underpinning for a decade of greed and materialism. There is simply no basis for blaming public servants for the job insecurity that thousands of people face in the private sector.

And now, it seems, public servants are themselves so angry that they may well decide to take on their employer — the Government — in a long drawn out battle over pay.

All the signs are that the proposed public service pay agreement will be rejected, and if that happens we may well be entering an era of instability that could do untold damage. We will certainly learn how important and essential our public services are to our quality of life if, one by one, they start to be withdrawn.

I have to say, in all honesty, I understand why public servants would want to reject this agreement. From all sorts of perspectives, it reads like a “heads I win, tails you lose” document. As long as nothing further goes wrong in the economy, the best the Government can offer is no more pay cuts and no compulsory redundancies. But any new crisis and all bets are off. And what constitutes a new crisis? Suppose, for example (and don’t rule out the possibility) another large sum of public money has to be found to help the Quinn Group to survive? Would it be public servants who would have to stump up for that through more pay cuts?

So there is no certainty here — or if there is, the only certainty is that things won’t get worse for public servants unless the Government has a new funding crisis. Meanwhile, public servants too will face rising interest payments and mortgage repayments from salaries that are likely to be frozen for several years to come.

It’s not something to look forward to, is it? And yet I hope, when they get a chance to vote on the agreement in the privacy of wherever they fill in their ballots, that a majority of public servants vote yes for the agreement.

It won’t perhaps, come as a surprise if I tell you I’m not suggesting this out of love for the Government. There is no doubt in my mind that a lot of public servants want to kick the Government and feel very aggrieved that their employer has turned them into scapegoats for a political and economic fiasco caused in its entirety by bad politics. But there is a time coming when we will all have the only real democratic opportunity to kick the Government that matters.

Oddly enough, if public servants decide to take on the Government now, and to fight a series of battles across the range of public services, they could end up forcing people to decide that the Government has to be supported. It might well be the case that the Government could relish the chance to show “strong leadership” by taking on battles with teachers and others.

Neither am I arguing that public servants should vote yes because there is no alternative. There may well be no alternative — we simply don’t know.

This agreement was negotiated behind closed doors — we haven’t seen the economic and fiscal projections that persuaded the public sector union leaders to compromise in the way they have. The immediate likelihood is that the alternative to agreement is strife, but of course the possibility exists that at the end of that strife another, different agreement might emerge.

The one and only reason I would argue for a yes vote is because I believe public servants are patriots. I don’t mean to use the term pretentiously, or as a form of plámás. People don’t go into the public service, at any level, to get rich. They want to teach, they want to be nurses, or firemen or librarians or managers, primarily because they want to serve the people. I’ve known people in the public service who are doing the thing they have wanted to do all their lives, gardaí who never wanted to do anything else, civil servants who get huge job satisfaction from helping to develop policy on the environment, or helping to raise standards of housing.

At local and national level, I’ve worked alongside public servants who are motivated primarily by a commitment to their city or their hospital or their school.

BUT I’ve never met a public servant who was in it for the money, or who couldn’t care less about letting their country down. Sure, job security matters and people do worry about their pensions and their increments — don’t we all? Anyone who has to raise a family has to worry about these things.

But public servants, to a greater extent than most bankers I’ve met recently, care about the public service. They care about its standards and its outcomes, and they care about the fact that without decent public services, thousands of people — poorer people, carers, disabled people, sick people, vulnerable people — would suffer.

And as they’re making up their minds now, wondering how to vote in respect of a deal that offers little except the hope that things won’t get worse — all those people will be on their minds too.

Our public services can’t be sustained by economic growth or some new explosion of wealth. For the next couple of years at least, our public services can only be sustained by the shared sacrifice of public servants.

That’s why voting no would be understandable, and maybe even satisfying. Voting yes would be hard, and the reward slow in coming. But it wouldn’t be the first time that Ireland’s public servants put their country first.