Imposing cuts but protecting privilege

The cuts to home-help and home-care services may be a foretaste of December’s budget but that does not make them in any way palatable.

These are lifeline services but cuts affecting elderly and disabled people dominated the package designed to save just €130m from the HSE’s overall budget of something around €13bn. That €130m pales even further when you consider that the HSE is well over budget and further cuts are inevitable unless the goalposts are moved. Or, more accurately, unless our Government finally finds, as it will have to eventually, the courage to move those deeply rooted goalposts.

Yesterday Labour leader and Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore said the cuts are “regrettable’’ but that “every organisation, every department and every service has to obviously work within budget”. It’s impossible to disagree with any of that. Education Minister Ruairi Quinn said cuts had to be made “because we have lost our economic sovereignty, we are no longer in control of our cheque book”. Again, it’s impossible to disagree with any of that.

Labour chairman Colm Keaveney said he was “very uncomfortable” with the cuts but accepted the need to deal with the HSE’s €260m deficit. Cuts, he said, should be targeted. “If I were minister ... I’d be tackling consultant salaries and drug costs,” he declared. Once again, it’s impossible to disagree with any of that.

However, it is disappointing that three senior Labour figures acknowledged the cuts are regrettable — as did SIPTU — but made no public connection between their persistent support for the Croke Park process — no pay cuts, no redundancies — and the fact that home-help and home-care services are to be taken from some of the most dependent in society.

Unfortunately we have reached the point where the continued protection of those at the top end of state-funded pay scales, in the face of life-diminishing cuts like those announced this week, can only be described as immoral. It is unfortunate too that this division, this game-changing inequity, is sustained by a Government elected to reform, to re-infuse, our public life with decency and dignity.

Maybe yesterday’s elephant-in-the-room statement from Health Minister James Reilly was that neglected mandate showing some signs of life. How reassuring it would be if it was.

At the end of last year, 2,358 HSE staff were earning six-figure salaries. In education 400 second-level teachers and 32 department officials crossed the €100,000 a year Rubicon.

To cast the net a little wider, though these workers are not covered by Croke Park, 143 employees at State-owned IBRC earn €100,000 or more a year. IBRC lost €724m up to the end of June. At BoI, where there were pre-tax losses of €1.25bn for the first six months, more than 600 employees are paid more than €100,000 a year. Forty-three earn multiples of that.

And we, a Christian/post-Christian society, propose to cut supports for old and disabled citizens, possibly pushing lives made tolerable by modest social supports into an untenable isolation?

It is not begrudgery to confront these inequities. It is just recognising that the juxtaposition of that level of State-financed reward and the withdrawal of basic human services is wrong. And if we know it’s wrong we must confront it. There are good people in Government. Let us hope that before the December budget is cast they find the gumption to fight the good fight because if they don’t this society will be divided in an entirely indefensible, unsustainable way.