It doesn’t pay to believe all Civil Service privilege stories

LIKE internet stories about faked moon landings and how the ‘illuminati’ run the world, stories about public service special payments are legion.

Your average civil servant gets a financial re-up for wearing shoes to work, or if the wind changes direction, or if the kitchen runs out of ginger nuts. Since Brendan Howlin hid in his bedroom rather than slash and cut like he promised, the media has been joyfully listing daft allowances.

As headlines, many of these payments are an outrage-inducing gift.

For instance, there are public servants who receive a bonus for carrying keys. A big bunch of keys can be heavy, and can ruin the line of a suit if you are forced to carry them in your pocket: except that’s not the reason they receive the payment.

Some workers at the Chester Beatty Library are key-holders, meaning that if an alarm goes off at two in the morning, they have to get out of bed, travel into work and switch it off. That’s not quite so cosseted.

This is not to argue that none of the 1,100 special payments need to be re-considered — unquestionably, they do — but that the reportage of the situation has taken on a cartoonish dimension, with all public workers depicted as bloated hedonists who don’t care if the country sinks as long as they continue to receive their pencil-sharpener allowance.

These payments say less about our civil service than they do about our peculiarly Irish way of tackling industrial relations.

In both the private and public sector, there’s long been a practice of not calling a raise a raise, but an ‘allowance’ or an ‘expense’: so both sides can claim a degree of victory.

While the government faffs and the media becomes near-rabid in blaming public servants for all our problems, the reputation of our public service is further damaged: they are already up there with bankers and property developers. Yet, unlike those two groups, the public service fulfils many socially useful and crucial roles. They teach, they heal, they protect, they clean, they do all the boring paperwork. We’ve come close to forgetting that an effective public service is a good thing: it is one of the primary signifiers of a civilised country.

Do further cuts need to be made? Sadly, yes. And, yes, there are sections of it weighed down with bureaucracy.

It should be possible to fire a civil servant for incompetence. No doubt, many of them are lazy and have little grasp of the idea of service. But such problems are not solved just by financial cuts but by changing the ethos and culture of our public services — a process that should have been ongoing before, during and after the Celtic Tiger.

The aim shouldn’t be to eviscerate and vilify the public service, but transform it into something we are all proud of.