Labour shielding civil and public servants while others feel pain

Mr Curley’s exoneration of civil and public servants from blame for dragging down our country is as self-serving as it is wrong (‘We public servants are not to blame for crisis’, Dec 4).

The civil and public servants were not, and are not, in the least bit shy or bashful in using their considerable industrial relations clout in getting our weak-livered politicians to grant them levels of pay which continue to be way out of line with those of their paymasters in the private sector, as well as with their counterparts in every other European country.

With considerable support from the hard-pressed tax-payers of Europe, the private sector in Ireland must underwrite the borrowing of billions of euro every year to continue to pay the excessive salaries and pensions of the said civil and public servants.