Balancing the books - Self-interest becomes dishonesty

Once upon a time, when far more people went to pubs than do now, there was a pretty common character disliked and avoided because he invariably and knowingly left when it was his turn to buy a round of drinks.

In the mores of that time he offended etiquette and tradition. He shamelessly dodged his responsibilities.

Unfortunately we seem well along the road to adopting the round dodger’s tactics in trying to avoid unavoidable and necessary cuts in public expenditure. Yesterday’s announcement — among a range of positive developments — that a new grade of hospital consultant will be established and paid something around 30% less than incumbents confirms that. Today consultants’ salaries range from €147,000 to about €200,000. In future consultants will be employed on a salary scale between €116,000 and €121,000. This is a spectacular and overdue change but it reeks of protecting privilege and skinning those not at the negotiating table. By all means cut these table-topping salaries but it would have been far more equitable if today’s consultants faced pay cuts rather than imposing the cost of recovery squarely on the shoulders of tomorrow’s doctors.

This last-man-in-first-man-cut principle has already been imposed on new teachers. Teachers’ unions, always determined to do the right thing, endorsed greatly reduced circumstances for their successors but decided that they had suffered enough themselves.

Bequeathing the consequences of economic collapse by one generation to the next is as destructive as it is wrong. Ireland’s young people, those who have not yet fled abroad, are shackled with an almost insurmountable national debt because their parents’ generation acted so very irresponsibly. If they are lucky enough to have a home of their own they are probably in negative equity and struggling to repay a mortgage and it’s probably best not to mention child-minding costs or the return of college fees. And, just in case they think they see a light at the end of a long tunnel a report on Social Protection Minister Joan Burton’s desk warns that our state pension schemes are under-funded to the tune of €1.5bn a year and will implode as those beginning careers as teachers or hospital doctors today retire.

This trans-generational shakedown is the root of the disconnected reaction to suggestions that some pensions, no matter how splendid, might be cut. It, seemingly, also informs the next redundancy deal to be offered to public workers. The Association of Higher Public and Civil Servants have claimed employees will be offered five weeks’ pay for each year of service. This figure is light years beyond anything current elsewhere. It will be funded by more borrowing which will be paid, naturally, by these workers’ successors who, inevitably, will be on far lower pay scales. That many of these “redundant” workers will get early pensions — guess who’ll pay them? — rather than the unemployment benefits usually offered to “redundant” people just rubs salt into a deepening and polarising wound.

Four years after our economic collapse it seems that our response is still shaped by self-interest, social and intergenerational dishonesty. Those with the power to shift the burden of recovery to others seem very happy to do so. That they are aided and abetted by Government points again to the moral feebleness and the dearth of social conscience or courage that has so discredited our political system and our politicians.