Public pay talks ‘like a bad western’

WESTERN fans (don’t switch over) will remember the scene from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly where the character Tuco is in his bath and an old adversary comes to kill him. The hapless assailant begins a monologue about how long he’s waited to kill Tuco. As he reaches the crescendo of his speech, Tuco shoots him with a concealed gun and utters the immortal line: “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk”.

The Government should take inspiration from Tuco – it won’t, but it should. The current miserable stalemate over the public pay and reform agreement suggests two tired old assailants unable to pull their respective triggers.

The unions know they won’t get support from their members for an all-out strike.

The Government wouldn’t know how to begin responsibly to reform the public service that it did its very best to undermine and sabotage through appointing thousands of friends to hundreds of quangos. And even if it did, it wouldn’t do it on the basis that dog doesn’t eat dog.

The failure properly to set up the HSE is just one example of a piece of administrative negligence that has blown up in the Government’s face. Rather than reform the HSE, we will now, courtesy of the Labour Court, have to settle for making nurses work longer for less pay – hardly the revolution promised by Kieran Mulvey of the Labour Relations Commission.

The corrupt principle that reform is for little people has been reasserted without a single shot being fired.

The viewers of this second-rate western, the long-suffering public, deserve more than the current paralysis that ultimately suits both of these ugly, tired old gunslingers.

If we had a decent government it would take the situation in hand, Tuco-style, and use its authority to initiate a campaign of significant and meaningful reform, beginning with the political and therefore indigent nature of the Department of Finance.

A good government would start shooting down all the dodgy quangos – that’ll be 90% – the listing of which, created in the past 13 years, would curdle the blood of even the most hardened of viewers. But don’t wait up – you know how this movie ends.

Declan Doyle

Lisdowney

Kilkenny