Heroic public servants have made great sacrifices for the nation

MOST of us, I think, still have difficulty coming to terms with what happened to our economy in the crash.

In years to come, historians and analysts will publish thousands of words trying to pinpoint the causes. And maybe, when the history is written, the real villains will be identified (I’ll come back to the subject of villains in a minute).

But I wonder will anyone seek out the heroes? If we do succeed in rebuilding our economy, it will only be because so many people have made sacrifices along the way. Not all of those sacrifices have been made willingly, of course. Nobody volunteered to lose their jobs. Not too many of us have enthusiastically embraced concepts like negative equity. We haven’t cheered for property taxes.

But look at these two figures just for a minute. At the end of 2007, when nobody in the then government (and nobody else, for that matter) had the faintest idea of what was just around the corner, they made a provision for public service pay in the following year of €19.4bn. The provision for next year will be barely over €15bn.

Think about that. The vast majority of adults in Ireland have lived through working lives where an annual pay increase — sometimes more than one in a year — have been the norm. But for the past four years there have been no increases for public servants. In fact the total public sector pay bill today is three-quarters of what it was five years ago.

In a survey published over the weekend, the employers’ body IBEC said that 40% of its private sector members were planning to increase pay this year. None, it seems, are planning further pay cuts. But public servants throughout Ireland are facing yet another year of retrenchment in their pay and conditions. They face a brutal and, in many ways, astonishing change. The last time public service pay was unilaterally cut by a government in Ireland was in 2009. Prior to that, the only previous occasion on which civil and public servants saw their pay and conditions materially worsened by their employer was in 1933.

It’s been tough, really tough. But the most astonishing thing about it is that it has been accomplished — and accomplished without strife. We have had four years of industrial peace throughout the public service, despite very considerable cutbacks. There is no other country in the world where you could envisage the public service pay bill being reduced by a quarter without strikes, protest and dissent.

That is an extraordinary testament to the patriotism of Irish public servants, and a tribute to the leadership of their trade unions. It also means, of course, that the much derided Croke Park Agreement has worked — and it’s not as if there has been much of a trade-off. The reduction in the overall bill has been achieved by cutting numbers as much as pay. There may not (yet) be a tradition of compulsory redundancy in the public service, but throughout the country our public servants — nurses, gardaí, teachers and many others — have learned to do more with less. And that process will continue.

It continues against a background of endless attacks on the public service. No one can argue that every public servant in Ireland is a paragon of virtue, but we do have one of the best — and most efficient — public services in the world, taken as a whole. It’s not just me that says that — the OECD reported it a few years ago. And yet it’s possible to read, any day of the week, one commentator or another writing about a feather-bedded service, public sector fat cats, and the like.

That wasn’t the case, of course, in the years of the Celtic Tiger, when public servants were sneered at because they weren’t out there making big bucks in the marketplace. In those good old days the private sector was the only place to be, and anyone who wanted to make a living as a librarian, say, was seen as a loser.

Ah, the good old days. When I was looking for the figures on public service pay — they’re all available on government websites — I came across one fascinating table that shows, all too clearly, what went wrong – and how. It’s on the website of the Department of Public Enterprise and Reform, under the heading of “Expenditure Trends”. Its bald figures are shocking.

When Bertie Ahern became Taoiseach, and made Charlie McCreevy his Finance Minister, current public spending as a whole stood at just under €17bn. As they began to prepare for their first re-election, it increased (in 2000 and 2001) by 32%. In the run-up to their second re-election — Bertie’s famous third victory — it went up by 23%. When Bertie finally left, public spending stood at a whopping, and unsustainable, €49bn. And Brian Cowen increased it further in his government’s first budget. We’ve all been paying the price ever since.

That was, you may recall, a period of right-wing government. Bertie may once have famously described himself as a socialist, but he, McCreevy, McDowell and Harney didn’t believe in big government. So they said, anyway, again and again. They did believe in spending massive amounts of other people’s money in election years.

Of course, public servants benefited from those increases too. At certain levels — especially at higher levels — pay got utterly out of control then. Benchmarking — what Joe O’Toole referred to as the public servants’ ATM machine — ensured that higher public service pay in particular was compared to the wilder things happening in the private sector in Ireland, rather than the more sober things happening to public servants throughout Europe.

IT came to a sudden stop when the crisis began. Brian Lenihan spelled it out when he moved the “Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (No. 2) Bill” at the end of 2009. That bill was, as I said, the first since 1933 to cut public service pay unilaterally.

At a stroke it slashed the pay of every grade in the sector, and took a billion euro off the pay bill. As Lenihan put it at the time: “The public service pay bill accounts for more than a third of all current spending and is the largest component in the cost of providing public services. In these circumstances, this Government has no option but to reduce public service salaries … We are well aware that most public servants are not on very high salaries. We know that, like others, they have mortgages to pay and families to support.”

And they still do. I heard Sheila Nunan, Joe O’Toole’s successor as head of the national teachers’ union, say on Saturday that all her members knew about the round of discussions now beginning was that they would have less take-home pay at the end of it than they do now.

So isn’t it time that we stopped attacking public servants? Isn’t it time we began to recognise that they have paid a large share of the price of national recovery? If we’re looking for heroes, isn’t it time to recognise that a lot of them are to be found in Ireland’s public service?