The public pay genie is out of the bottle

SO, the genie is out of the bottle and, if we may mix metaphors, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men have a better chance of getting Humpty Dumpty on the field for this evening’s game in Chicago between New Zealand and Ireland than this Government has of containing public sector pay demands already flowing from the last-minute deal struck to avert a garda strike. 

Within hours, at least four unions demanded a review of the Lansdowne Road pact. This return to a monkey-with-the-biggest-stick industrial relations was inevitable once Government conceded. Why, after all, should one group of public employees be treated differently to another? This sounds the death knell for the trumpeted commission on public pay even before it gets out of the blocks.

If you are a garda in, say, your early 30s with a family and a mortgage, based in a country town where things move slowly enough and promotion is unlikely, you probably regard the deal as a stopgap until a better one can be wrenched from this weak Government. That view will be shared by public servants including the teachers whose action may close schools next week. If that garda has a brother in the same town and more-or-less the same point in life but working in, say, the local garage, the idea of pay ‘restoration’ is as improbable as Humpty Dumpty singing ‘Ireland’s Call’ tonight. And there it is, that’s the dilemma polarising and threatening this society.

The guard believes absolutely that he deserves to be paid more but the

private sector worker knows the only thing in this for him is higher taxes, reduced services, or both — because the money needed to increase public sector pay will have to be diverted from elsewhere or borrowed.

Public employees are unhappy as pay ‘restoration’ remains an aspiration. Department of Public Expenditure and Reform figures show the average gross pay of public servants fell from just over €60,200 in 2008, but has returned to close to €55,000. Public sector numbers have climbed too. The number of exchequer-funded public servants (excluding local authorities) is at pre-crisis levels of about 285,000. The gross cost of pay and pensions is at a pre-crash peak at €19.378bn.

Pay costs are lower, but pension costs have soared from €1.6bn in 2008 to around 2.8bn this year.

It seems a dispassionate view on this impasse is impossible. One group has a bullet-proof sense of entitlement and the leverage to achieve it, the other group looks on like peripheral worker drones becoming more like second-class citizens every year. This is as socially unsustainable as it is undesirable. All public workers, including guards, deserve to be paid properly. Figures show that our police are among the better-paid in Europe. The thousands who apply each time training places are offered in the force suggest a policeman’s lot may not the ordeal some suggest. It would be wonderful if we could all be paid more and work less, and maybe retire in our 50s. But we can’t afford that. To do so would mean we’d have to borrow more, and that’s a one-way ticket to economic chaos. This Government will be in office six months tomorrow but this deal will provoke anger from both sides, and the chaos that will shorten its life. Batten down the hatches.