Aer Lingus threat - A symptom of a crisis we can’t dodge

The assertive if increasingly desperate position taken by Aer Lingus workers over their €930m pension scheme deficit is entirely understandable.

It more accurately reflects the feelings of the tens of thousands of people in a similar position than official Ireland would immediately recognise or care to acknowledge.

What strike action might achieve is, however, another matter entirely. The Aer Lingus workers’ dilemma is not unique but a solution, even a proposal, to the pensions’ time bomb seems as remote as ever. In a functioning society, one with the good sense to plan for the inevitable, that would not be the case.

Billions have been paid into schemes that will never deliver the returns promised. Millions went in fees to administrators who proved utterly disastrous. In some cases pension professionals may get more out of schemes than those who funded them. One scheme after another has been declared deficient and workers who paid for a retirement income proportionate to their salary face a future with one certainty — they will have to survive on a lot less than anticipated. It’s foolish to imagine this is just a private sector problem and that public sector or semi-state employees can be certain that their arrangements, even for current employees, are guaranteed.

AIB simply closed its defined benefit scheme saying it was unsustainable. Attention will move to the other banks owned by the State — Irish Life & Permanent and IBRC. When they follow AIB’s example it is hard to think that current arrangements in semi-state companies and the public sector can stand for long. The crisis may be considered by Croke Park II, if there is to be one, because present commitments are unsustainable.

While Aer Lingus workers fight to try to recover a pretty basic pension it is reported by The Irish Times that the value of the pension entitlements accruing to Government ministers means their total annual remuneration can exceed €400,000. In one case — one of the youngest cabinet members, Simon Coveney — that figure reached €500,000. This is so bizarre, so wrong that it reads like a Romanov court circular from 1917 celebrating a way of life about to be swept away in a tide of revolutionary blood over the following months.

The figures are immoral and indefensible. They insulate our ruling class — elected or appointed mandarin — spectacularly from the challenges faced by a great majority of citizens and may explain why, several years into the pensions’ crisis, we do not have a pensions’ minister with responsibility for developing proposals for a national, universal pension scheme. A universal health insurance scheme has been promised by Health Minister James Reilly so why not a universal pension scheme? They are after all no more than forms of insurance.

It is difficult to understand the inaction, in public at least, of Government on this issue because they know as well as any impoverished pensioner the figures just do not add up. Is it possible, as seems to be the case around pending insolvency legislation, that the pensions industry has more clout than tens of thousands of disunited pensioners?

This is a fundamental, society-defining issue and it must be confronted, hopefully before it is too late.