Personally, I’d never turn down the chance to keep my aide de camp...

LAST week Simon Coveney, the Foreign Affairs Minister, was given clearance to keep his State car and Garda driver, a privilege not normally extended to someone in his position.

In news that was perhaps not unrelated, we were already aware that Leo Varadkar, though he is now just Tanaiste, was keeping his aide de camp — as indeed would many of us, if we could.

Personally, I would never turn down the chance of keeping my aide de camp, to represent me at various events that I couldn’t attend in person — indeed I wouldn’t turn down the chance of being an aide de camp, if it came to that.

While these are expensive additions to the already impressive entourages of Mr Coveney and Mr Varadkar, we understand that their lives are quite complicated — and that they have now shown as a matter of fact that they are entitled to these extra layers of security or just plain grandeur.

Indeed as senior Irish politicians, by European standards they would already be in the higher tier as regards salaries or remuneration or compensation or whatever they’re calling those hefty six-figure sums these days. Which is nice.

And I am not here today to complain about any of that, just to remark that for them, it is indeed nice. What is not nice, for many others, is the fact that the Covid payments are going down in some cases from €350 a week to just over €200. And at some stage it will be going altogether.

And with it will go that brief but tantalising glimpse that some of its recipients have had, into a better world than the one they’ve been inhabiting.

Not a lot better, you understand. Just better in the sense that the terrible wage they usually get did not actually require them to do the terrible job for a while — so it was roughly half as terrible ... but still, it was better.

Too good for the critics though, who immediately expressed their grave concerns that the “free money” was promoting a form of decadence — that there was no incentive for some of these people to go back to work.

That it was basically too much.

Naturally they did not take this opportunity to reflect on the fact that the reason these anomalies might arise is that so many are being paid so little in the first place.

No, it was all just too much.

So apart from anything else, the “free money” provided a perfect illustration of the psychology which informs much of our official thinking on these matters — the thought that the little people might be getting away with something, however small, sets off a kind of a panic in the hearts of those who accept the vast entitlements of the political or the corporate class as if they were merely manifestations of Mother Nature at work.

There are oceans of “free money” out there, for all sorts of services provided to the State — it seems that public money is somehow sweeter than any other kind. So we gaze in awe at the payments for the Children’s Hospital, or for the top PR professionals, or for the many-splendoured consultants, or just for adornments to the lifestyles of the Tanaiste or the

Foreign Affairs Minister.

And yes, there are constant murmurings of discontent about such largesse. But the moment it appeared that the minimumwage crew might be getting an oul’ break of the ball for a change, there were loud cries of alarm from those who feared that the very “morality” which underpins the world of work was being overthrown here.

Pat McDonagh the Supermac’s supremo, speaking to Sarah McInerney on RTE Radio, could hardly find the right words to convey the depths of his disappointment at where all this was going

— so he chose some of the wrong words instead.

Yet the cries died down after a while, partly due to the fact that the Covid “free money” was starting to look like a remarkably good idea on the whole. Indeed it was particularly remarkable in an economic culture which has been prescribing really bad ideas for so long — they’re quietly admitting now that the whole austerity thing was... shall we say, flawed.

And it wasn’t just the financial aspects of the Covid money that were good, such as the fact that many of the people getting it would be putting it straight back into the economy rather than salting it away in their offshore accounts — it was also good in psychological terms, it gave people some sense of security for a few weeks at least.

In fact it was probably the single most important move the Government made to stabilise the situation, it achieved its crucial purpose of helping a lot of people to absorb the shock — and of just helping them anyway.

And it should be acknowledged as such, indeed you’d wonder why there isn’t more bragging about it — then again if such notions began to take hold, you’d never know where it might end.

Next thing you know, everyone will want their own aide de camp.

‘The thought that the little people might be getting away with something sets off a panic’