Pay demands of our gardaí are a farce even Flann O’Brien couldn’t dream up
With so many perks (a bicycle one included), are the rest of us are being taken for a ride?
Is it about a bicycle? That was the catchphrase of Flann O’Brien’s black comic masterpiece The Third
Policeman. The classic novel concerns a man in search of an ever-elusive box of cash who’s caught in the insanely bureaucratic clutches of a bunch of bicycle-obsessed policemen led by a Sergeant Pluck who turn logic on its head as they repeatedly thwart him.
It’s a bit like Michael Noonan trying to find money for tax cuts as the guards – as well as bus drivers and other publicsector workers – throw spanners in the works by demanding more money.
The Third Policeman should be required reading, not to mention O’Brien’s other classic An Béal Bhocht, in order to fully comprehend public-sector claims for pay hikes that way exceed rises elsewhere, and are on top of pay that is already 44% higher than the private sector.
And this issue does indeed involve a bicycle. Or at least a bicycle allowance – and over 100 other sundry allowances. Let me explain… Like O’Brien’s comic creations, publicsector unions seem to inhabit a cartoon Ireland, a comically surreal land where nothing is quite as it seems and logic is turned on its head.
They repeatedly point out how young guards can’t live on a starting salary of €23,750 – or teachers on their starting pay packet of €28,000. That is low. But once in the public sector you’re on an elevator of ever-rising pay that sees the gardaí get €42,138 after eight years with two further increments after 13 and 19 years’ service bringing pay up to €45,793. And there are allowances to top this up across the entire public sector.
In reply to a recent Dáil query, Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald estimated that ‘unsocial hours payments [alone]… amount to between 25% and 30% of [Garda] earnings.’
‘Even at the entry level of €23,750 and the lower end of unsocial hours scale, this will add almost €6,000 to the salary. Other allowances may also be payable, as may overtime.’
A bicycle allowance is no longer paid to new guards but it is still ‘paid to members of garda and sergeant rank who have been directed to provide themselves with a bicycle,’ an official guide states. The mountain bike unit doesn’t get this allowance. But at the last count there were 70 Sergeant Plucks paid €2.77 a week to help with the upkeep of their bicycles (or possibly to compensate for partly turning into one, as O’Brien’s book
surmised would happen to overenthusiastic cyclists.)
In another Flann O’Brienesque twist, there are Garda allowances for not getting allowances. For example, if a garda is on an exchange programme with another force and doesn’t qualify for the juicy perks available here, he or she gets an allowance to compensate.
An allowance paid to compensate gardaí for working regular hours – because such hours prevented them from earning extra for working ‘unsocial hours’ – has been stopped for new members.
But among 42 allowances that were investigated and allowed to continue after a review in 2012 were a ‘plain clothes’ allowance that compensates members of the force for wearing their own clothes in the line of duty.
Little wonder these lucrative perks – some of them tax-free – are a key battleground in the wrangle over garda pay.
A Government proposal to restore the rent allowance – worth more than €4,000 – for gardaí recruited since 2012 was not enough. The Garda Representative Association, which represents rank-and-file members, wants all terms and conditions that existed prior to 2008 reinstated –including, presumably, the bicycle allowance, as well as a new ‘police service’ allowance. The Lansdowne Road Agreement is the structure for industrial relations and pay within the public service until 2018. This will boost public-sector pay by €844m over three years, according to Frances Fitzgerald. If gardaí are given a special deal, she believes the Lansdowne accord would collapse, leading to spiralling industrial unrest and undermining the public finances. This would undermine hopes of tax cuts to ease pressure on middle-income workers who inhabit another O’Brien fantasy world outlined in An Béal Bocht. This a place called Corcha Dorcha, where ‘it never stops raining and everyone lives in desperate poverty (and always will)’.