Dáil debates

Tuesday, 15 December 2009

6:00 pm

Photo of Eamon GilmoreEamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

Wages, both in the public and the private sectors, inevitably raced to catch up with mortgages.

I agree, there was a lot of money being made in those years, but it was not being made by the young couples, including many young teachers and civil servants, who took out enormous mortgages to pay for modest houses. Now that the bubble has burst, those homeowners are trapped in negative equity and many have lost their jobs or taken a pay cut. The people who profited at their expense are laughing all the way to the taxpayer guaranteed banks. No multimillionaire developer will lose his luxury home in this recession. No banker, pensioned off for millions after dragging our banking system into the gutter, will struggle to pay for Christmas at the end of the month. However, public servants, who have already taken an average 13% cut in pay in the past 12 months, on top of new income tax levies and cuts in child care payments and benefit, will struggle. The decision by this Fianna Fáil-Green Government to inflict an across the board public service pay cut, from the cleaner who starts work at 4 a.m. to the university head whose office she cleans, is not only extremely unjust, but extremely unwise, short-sighted and ill-judged.

Consider what the Government had won in the negotiations. It had consensus on the need for a €1.3 billion reduction in the public service pay bill, not just from the public sector unions, but also from the main Opposition parties. It had sector by sector agreements that would have delivered far-reaching reforms of how the public sector is organised, and public services delivered. For example, a working day in the health sector would have run from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., with overtime being paid only outside of these hours. We know from an bord snip that up to €575 million in HSE staffing efficiencies could be achieved, between reformed working practices, redeployment and other efficiencies. All in all, the Government and the public sector unions had agreed permanent savings of hundreds of million euro a year.

However, despite this unprecedented level of agreement on public sector reform and reductions in the public sector pay bill, the Government chose to move the goalposts and deliberately collapse the talks. Political expediency won out over political vision. The Government did this to court political popularity and to serve the agenda to drive down pay levels, not just in the public sector, but in the private sector as well. Instead of having the bottle to drive a programme of reform in the public service that would have delivered permanent savings and better services, it took the easy option of imposing a harsh pay cut on all public servants, from the bottom up. In doing so, it lost an invaluable opportunity to improve public service delivery for less money. Our public services need to be reformed and no-one knows this better than public servants themselves who have to deal with bureaucratic inefficiencies, restrictive work practices and a promotion structure that favours hierarchy over hard work and talent.

The Labour Party has been proposing public service reforms for a number of years, but these proposals have been ignored by Fianna Fáil. We have suggested more efficient ways of scrutinising public expenditure so that doubling up of quangos or costly mistakes like e-voting can be avoided. We have proposed more flexible redeployment across the public sector so that public servants can be used where they are needed most. We have proposed opening up recruitment to allow talent to circulate more freely within and between the public and private sectors.

There has been no shortage of reports detailing what reforms are needed in the public sector, most recently, the OECD report on public services and the Government document, Transforming Public Services, which was published last November. What has been in short supply is the political will to implement the necessary reforms. For the past decade, Fianna Fáil took the advice of Charlie McCreevy and partied on with taxpayers' money. It papered over the cracks with booming Exchequer returns built on the shifting sands of the property market, throwing money at the symptoms of problems rather than addressing their root cause. Again and again, Fianna Fáil chose the easy option of increasing the public pay bill rather than reforming the services. Now we have arrived at the flip side of that misguided policy; cut the pay of public servants, instead of reforming the services. No doubt that will please those hard-line commentators, many of them the paid lackeys of the banks, who have been calling for pain to be inflicted on nurses, gardaí and local authority workers. At times the invective against public servants has been so harsh that one would be forgiven for believing it was the nurses from accident and emergency departments who borrowed all the money to speculate on development land, that it was the local authority librarians who lent them the money and not the bankers and that it must have been the gardaí who were running the banks.

The Bill before the House will unilaterally change the contracts of employment of approximately 350,000 employees of the State. The Labour Party has been consistent in opposing unilateral, across-the-board pay cuts and in its argument that the pay bill can be better reduced by negotiation and reform. The party has been criticised for that. It is suggested that our defence of public services and of people's contracts of employment is because we have a soft spot for the public service unions.

Let me be clear that the Labour Party is beholden to no special interest, trade union or other body. As I stated at a recent SIPTU conference, a Labour Party Government would not be a trade union Government but a Government of all the people. I make no apology for standing up for the fire fighters and gardaí who risk their safety so we can all be safer, for the teachers who devote their energies to ensuring our children can learn better, for the nurses and health care workers who look after our sick, and for the council workers who grit the road on a frosty winter's morning or who stay up all night to help people save their flooded homes. The Labour Party believes in, and values, public services. It believes health, education, transport and infrastructure should be publicly provided.

The divide between the public and private sectors is a false one. A civilised society depends on good public services and every democracy depends on an efficient civil service. An enterprising economy needs the support of an efficient public sector to educate its workforce, support research and innovation in universities, build an efficient, joined-up transport infrastructure, regulate markets, protect consumers and build relationships with trading partners abroad. There are those who disagree and who argue for a circumscribed public sector, a weaker State, small-scale government and light regulation. However, the role of public services is to look after the public interest, that is, the interest of every single citizen in this State, however exalted or however humble his or her circumstances. We diminish, shrink and relinquish control of them at our peril.

We need an effective and efficient public service that is capable of protecting the public interest, be it in respect of education, the environment or the regulation of banks. However, one will never get this from staff who are under-valued, publicly maligned and demoralised. One will get it by respecting those who deliver our services, by valuing and encouraging what they do and, it is true, by obtaining better value for taxpayers' money. We need a motivated, fairly rewarded public service that will be always able to attract the most competent and public-spirited of its generation.

Many of those who belittle and demean public servants do not believe in public services in the first place. Some of them are motivated by self-interest in that a diminished public service opens up business opportunities for them. We need look no further than the hotel-quality super-private clinics built on public land a few hundred yards from chaotic and crowded public accident and emergency departments.

Fianna Fáil has firmly joined with those who are hostile to public service. It has turned its back on public servants, many of whom stayed loyal to that party down the decades, through Taca and the tribunals. It has done so because it has been persuaded that the electoral pickings are richer among those who do not value public services and who do not respect public servants. Instead of making the argument for better public services from which every man, woman and child can benefit and instead of obtaining better value for money in those services, it chooses to pursue its own political advantage and drive a wedge between public sector and private sector workers. This is a divisive and dangerous strategy which has no regard for our long-term economic recovery.

Our country is in an economic mess, a mess of Fianna Fáil's making. To get out of it, we must all pull together and not pull ourselves apart. We do not need to add to our own suffering through the conflict that is now being whipped up by a cynical, out-of-touch, short-sighted Fianna Fáil Government.

The Labour Party has been calling for a national recovery plan for a number of months. The Government has the opportunity tonight to abandon the unfair, divisive course it has taken and reopen negotiations with public sector employees and their unions. For the sake of national unity, the agenda must include a coherent jobs plan to get people back to work, or into quality education or training; a home guarantee, with statutory backing so people facing difficulties in meeting mortgage repayments will not be put out of their homes for the period of the recession; a fair and progressive approach to fixing the public finances; a negotiated deal to reduce the public sector pay bill and to ensure permanent efficiencies and better delivery in the public services; and a guarantee of industrial peace from the trade unions. What our country needs is solutions, not civil disorder and strife.

It is time to stop scapegoating public servants and to get on with the urgent business of establishing a sustainable path of recovery for our public finances and our economy. It is time to put the long-term public interest ahead of short-term political gain.

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