Unions wield power to get what they want but children needing surgery must wait Eddie Molloy–
PUBLIC service pay talks began yesterday in a flurry of media coverage, and over the coming months these negotiations will dominate the debate about next year’s budget, notwithstanding the many other pressing demands on the public purse.
In previous years, the unions exerted such disproportionate influence on how the cake got shared that, six months before any other claims got a look in at budget time, they already had 40pc of the available fiscal space in the bag.
Furthermore, if there was the slightest prospect of a general election in the air, as there is now, they were always able to extract further concessions from government. We saw this, to our great cost, in the profligate settlements of the Bertie Ahern era.
An example of the consequences for those outside the tent of this preferential treatment is the fate of the €35m repeatedly promised to improve grossly underfunded mental health services. Then on budget day last October, to the dismay of campaigners, the €35m was split into two chunks to be delivered over two years instead of all in 2017. There was no more money left in the kitty.
Roll on, however, and gardaí secure a deal worth €50m for which there was no provision in the 2017 budget. But not to worry, the money was found from “other sources”.
Just days after this deal was done, a senior trade union official was on RTÉ citing the Garda settlement and demanding that payment of the €1,000 due to every public servant in September 2017, as part of the Lansdowne Road Agreement, be brought forward to March. When challenged to say where the €120m cost of advanced payment would come from, he answered, knowing the power he wielded, “well it will just have to found”. And it was found, all €120m.
Contrast this bargaining power that extracted €170m over budgeted limits with that of children whose cases received extensive publicity around the same time as this “acceleration of pay restoration” was conceded. While the nation was aghast at the State’s egregious failure to protect ‘Grace’, we learned that thousands of children deemed to be at risk had no assigned social worker. And then there was the television programme showing the endless suffering of children waiting to have their grotesquely curved spines attended to.
Though many thousands of citizens are affected daily by these and other shameful deficiencies in our public services, there is no one with the power to snap their fingers and demand, for example, that €5m be found overnight from the magical “other sources” to end the acute pain of children with scoliosis.
Union members no doubt will take umbrage at this juxtaposition of their legitimate claims and the emotionally loaded examples just
mentioned. However, this is the harsh reality, whereby powerful vested interests invariably secure the lion’s share of whatever is going.
With so much air time given to the issue of public service pay, it tends to be forgotten that the fall-out of the crash in 2007 was not only an average pay cut of 13.5pc in the following seven years but also a sharp deterioration in public services, as the moratorium on recruitment kicked in.
Furthermore, investment in vital infrastructure collapsed by 63.7pc; the National Pensions Reserve Fund evaporated; and the national debt ballooned by another €80-100bn, partly to minimise the impact on public service pay and avoid forced redundancies.
While trade union leaders have every right to seek full pay restoration and will do so “without apology to anyone”, as they often assert, it is imperative that their demands be set in the wider context of the urgent need to restore public services; to rebuild and develop infrastructure to cater to a growing, ageing population; to address the so-called pensions time bomb; and to reduce the national debt, which is costing €7bn per annum in interest payments. Less than a year ago, this agenda was more than enough to be getting on with, when along came Brexit and Donald Trump, which undoubtedly will have a negative impact on the Irish economy, especially, once again, the private sector which took the brunt of hits from the 2007 crash.
In this context, the principle of affordability has to apply. While pay increases may be justified in specific sub-sectors and grades in order to attract and retain staff, how can anyone justify accelerated pay restoration, across the board, and before any talk of productivity is entertained, when, just for example, 660,000 people are waiting more than a year to see a doctor? This is one in seven of the population and they are predominantly poorer people who can’t afford health insurance.
The Nevin Institute, the economic think tank of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, has shown more wisdom in reconciling the many competing demands on the public purse than some of the unions’ own members and most politicians. The best way to put more money back in people’s pockets, the Institute says, is to improve public services, particularly in health, education and housing.
Against this background of very uneven representation of diverse interests and strategic national priorities around the table in Government Buildings, this year there is the prospect of more fairness and consideration of the longer-term public good, because of an intervention in February by Public Expenditure Minister Paschal Donohoe, when he told all departments to get their estimates in to him by the end of March.
Hopefully this means that as the pay negotiations unfold there should be less chance of a preemptive raid on the public purse by insiders. Thankfully, a steady economic recovery is under way but we are by no means out of the woods yet and, with a general election not far off, it will call for political leadership of the highest order to hold the line against re-instating an unsustainable public service pay bill.
Thankfully, a steady economic recovery is under way but we are by no means out of the woods yet