Hark! It’s the shrill whine of thwarted entitlement

BE honest now – if you had gotten used to having a chauffeurdriven car carting you around, would you be in any hurry to give it up? If you’d had several years of a swish motor and a skilled Garda driver at your beck and call, ready to drop or collect you at any hour of the day or night, wouldn’t you move mountains to hang on to it?

Aside from the luxury of letting someone else do the driving, there are all the other advantages that you’d never think of: gardaí can use the bus lanes, for example, so you’d get to speed past the plebs in the rush-hour traffic, and you’d never have to worry about parking fines or clampers. You could have a glass or two of Sancerre over lunch, a nice Châteauneuf with dinner – or even a couple of pints after an All-Ireland – and still take the car home. And you could catch up on work in leather-upholstered, reassuringly silent comfort while somebody else worried about white-van men, idiot cyclists and texting pedestrians.

So it’s hard to blame Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney for wanting to keep the State car he had as tánaiste. Though State cars for all but the taoiseach, tánaiste and minister for justice were abolished in 2011, Leo Varadkar reportedly secured the perk for his pal Simon by citing security concerns. As his duties will take him across the border regularly, especially as Brexit tensions heighten, the Minister will need the protection of a Garda driver.

Now, an ordinary citizen might wonder why that means he also needs a Garda driver to take him home to Cork, where the border with that independent republic remains unrecognised, or why he couldn’t just call on the gardaí whenever he needed to go to the North? But that is because ordinary citizens think like ordinary citizens, who run their own cars and buy their own petrol, and not like politicians who are accustomed to looking at the world through the bubble of privilege that political office bestows.

Since the row over Simon Coveney’s €200,000-a-year car erupted last week, some commentators have been muttering darkly about a return to the grim days of ‘Mercs and Perks’, when the pesky inconvenience of the deep 1980s recession didn’t dent our politicians’ enthusiasm for the lifestyles to which they’d eagerly become accustomed. While the rest of us were tightening our belts, as Mr Haughey famously advised, top politicians were busily letting theirs out a notch or two – first-class travel, executive lounges, corporate boxes, gourmet repasts in discreet Michelinstarred restaurants, five-star hotels, handmade Parisian shirts and top-ofthe-range German engineering all round. Nothing was too good for the Irish (political) working man.

THE problem about returning to the days of ‘Mercs and Perks’ is that we never really left them in the first place. It’s just that we only notice them when the cushioned realities of our politicians’ existences – with their gold-plated pensions; their unvouched expenses and allowances; their top-ups for chairing Dáil committees or being ‘super-juniors’; their free parking; mileage rates; printing, postage and stationery privileges; their advisers’ salaries and staff jobs for family members; their guaranteed incomes while previous posts are being held open for them – contrast so starkly with our own experiences.

Across the private sector, there’s a growing realisation that thousands who went on the Pandemic Unemployment Payment after their workplaces closed will never return to their previous jobs.

And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that the vast borrowings being swallowed up by this emergency will have to come out of somebody’s pocket.

So it’s only now we’re registering the costly perks and privileges, the expectations and extravagances that politicians routinely enjoy. During the boom, for example, Barry Cowen’s years of driving on a learner permit wouldn’t have caused a ripple – but now voters, looking at their own hefty car insurance bills, couldn’t help wondering why he never needed to make the saving that comes with passing the test. The superjuniors proposed ‘top-ups’, the pay cut that wasn’t, Simon Coveney’s car, Leo’s budget stay in Farmleigh, all now jump into focus as wasteful perks. And what was all the keening and wailing over the ‘unfair’ Cabinet divvy-up, if not the shrill whine of thwarted entitlement?

It’s only now that so many businesses and services, hostelries and households have fallen silent that we can hear it clearly...