Eoghan Harris (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State and I support the budget. I do not think he will agree with much more I have to say after that. The problem with the budget is that it does not go far enough, although I do not mean in regard to social welfare. I will not engage in any hand wringing. We needed this budget. I fully support the comments of Senators Burke and Twomey on the need to include the semi-State bodies in the remit.

I will concentrate on the common-sense grasp which the Irish people have on the facts. The recession has been a crash course on many things. I agree with the Minister of State's indication that the depression here was a result of a banking-fuelled construction industry, although he does not spell out the banking side, along with an international downturn. It was a lethal combination that did us in - we may have pulled ourselves out of the problem otherwise. Reality will break out eventually.

Separate from that issue, the question of the public sector has been around our necks like an albatross for most of my lifetime. I worked in the public sector for 25 years and the private sector for 20 years and I know there is good and bad in both. What I can say with certainty is that reform must be forced on the public sector. There is no chance whatever of anybody who has an emolument, as Edmund Burke pointed out, ever giving it up voluntarily. All talk of social partnership in a recession is a joke, as it only works in a period of surplus. It does not work in a recession. The talk should have stopped long ago and the Government should have governed.

I have personal experience of these issues and people should not talk about what they do not know in practice. When I worked in RTE, if I put out a good programme at 7 p.m. that had a large audience, I got exactly the same money as a person who put out a programme a half hour later and did not bother his backside about what was in it. The problem with the public sector is that it did not reward merit and excellence. One of the potential benefits from this recession will come if the Government toughens even further and states flatly to the public service that it will revisit the issue of pay and pensions and freeze all pay indefinitely until the public sector looks seriously at reform. The value of that reform should benefit good public servants.

I hate this sweet-talking of the public service and saying how much we worship and love it while all the time taking money from public servants. I believe in no hypocrisy. We are taking money from the public service because it got too much in the benchmarking period relative to everybody else. Everything in this life is relative. The public sector relative to the private sector in Ireland is a bit like the experience of the people of Britain in the Second World War relative to the people in the Soviet Union. It bears no comparison in terms of suffering.

The private sector is suffering real hardship but the public sector is a cosseted class. It is protected by a vested interest in the form of public service unions, which have had nothing to do for years under social partnership except to make mischief now. The unions are underemployed. What does a public service union representative do all day? I am speaking as a member of a general union for more than 20 years. These people do very little and now they are to make mischief.

I agree strongly with Senator Twomey as it is time for the Government to move to phase two and tackle the appalling position in semi-State bodies. Craft unions have got a grip on institutions like the ESB. These are not craft unions of the sort we understand in Ireland but rather those which come from a culture of British trade unionism of the Scargillite Trotskyite sort, which talks freely in Britain about taking down governments and taking them apart. They believe in the general strike and are always looking for mass strikes and confrontations.

That is the culture of the craft unions in the ESB and there is no point pretending it is not. There is no point pretending that it is the culture of the trade union movement that I grew up with. There have been two great traditions in the Irish trade union movement; these are general unions like the transport union and worker's union, which admitted anybody to their ranks, women and all. I do not give a damn about charges of trade union sectarianism here.

I have had personal experience of the craft unions and how they operate. They have kept out women and all forms of progressive change for years. In RTE they forced us into six-man crews when we could have managed quite happily with two and three-man crews; RTE manages with such crews now.

The craft unions must be taken on, if necessary by taking the ESB apart. No government should live under the constant threat of people who would state flatly that people cannot negotiate in the dark. That is no way to live or for a democracy to exist. Sooner or later the craft unions in the ESB will have to be taken on. If it is a question of them turning off the lights on the old and sick and incubators in hospitals, we must get equally tough with them. If that means breaking up the ESB, it is better we do so than tolerate that kind of blackmail. It is disgusting, repellant and we should reject it.

In the ESB we have a former trade union malcontent who wrecked Iarnród Éireann. There is another who has said people cannot negotiate in the dark. A third talks of taking down governments. They all owe their allegiance to a culture of Scargillism. Nobody here wants to tell the truth about these things. Had Rupert Murdoch and Thatcher not taken these people on, Britain would be a basket case today. I have experience of that in my own newspaper.

If Members want to read how craft trade unionism will leave Ireland, they should read Bill Bryson's famous book, Notes from a Small Island. There is a description of working for one of Murdoch's newspapers before the reform. A reporter asked the author to retrieve a telex detailing the latest stock exchange prices and he saw a man with his feet on the telex machine. He said the author could not touch the machine as it came under the remit of the graphical union. He could not tell the author the figures. The author could not get the paper himself because the man was on a break. That was the world of British craft unionism and we do not want to see it here.

We want to do business with the great traditions of the Irish Larkin and Connolly trade union movements, which put the national interest - rather than craft interest - first. There are people in the Irish trade union movement, David Begg among them, who are prepared to do business with the Government in response to a decent offer. There are others who have no intention of doing any business with the Government, and such people must be taken on. If the price is to take the semi-State bodies apart and privatise them, I am for that.

I respect people and all parties who have stood the hard line. My heroes are Kevin O'Higgins, Gerry Boland and Des O'Malley. My heroes are not the emollient ones. The Irish people have always welcomed good government and the reason this Government stands high in public opinion at the moment is because it took the hard choices. It had no other choice, of course, as necessity knows no law. Give it the credit for doing what was needed, as Fine Gael may need to face the same challenge at another time.

This is not the time for Fine Gael to finangle or floddle but, as Senator Twomey did, to tell the truth and lay it on the line to the craft unions in the ESB. There are no endless free lunches. The public sector found out the hard way that there are limits to public patience and tolerance. A teacher told me the other day that she did not even know half the perks teachers were entitled to until she listened to a teacher on Pat Kenny's show. They have so many perks they do not even know what they are.

The public service went to the well once too often with the public. The craft unions in the ESB are going to do it now and I will warn them in the words of James Connolly. If they try that with a democratic Irish State, they will rue the day. As Connolly said to the employers of Dublin, if it is to be a wake, let it be a wake and if it is to be a wedding, let it be a wedding; we are ready for either. This State is ready for either prospect. We should not lie down under that kind of threat. Put an end to the bully boys.