Eoghan Harris (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Mansergh. Senator Ross has stolen all my thunder. There are only a few little lightning bolts left. The Minister of State indicated:

the Government is determined that one of the key principles that will underpin its four-year plan will be that of fairness. Although perceptions of fairness can be subjective, I am confident that the Government can succeed in this regard.

I wish I could share that confidence but I do not. I also wish I could share Senator Ross's belief that the public sector will be reformed in this great crisis but I do not believe that either.

I have been struck, astonished and baffled since I came into this House in 2007. In the very first speech I made I said that reform of the public sector was my main passion. That was because I had spent so long in the public sector and in the private sector. Never the twain shall meet in terms of what a hard day's work is like. I soon learned that the days of Whitaker were long past and the days of patriotic public servants living frugally and performing their duties in the national interests were long past. I came into a world of grab and benchmark and selfishness.

I cannot believe the Government has got this far and is actively contemplating leaning on the welfare class and the private sector class for taxes and not taking the fat from where it can be found best, namely, the middle and upper echelons of the public sector, by which I particularly mean the Health Service Executive, the Electricity Supply Board and all the other ancillary groups who are battening on the public purse such as the Judiciary. The other day I downloaded the wage rates for the Health Service Executive. It was mind boggling because it was clear that the anecdotes about health executives rushing through hundreds of middle management promotions coming up to midnight when the health boards were abolished were well founded. The bottom line is that this is the world the Government faces. There are 2.1 million people at work in this country. Approximately 400,000 of them provide service in the public sector. Another 400,000 are unemployed or unemployable.

It is like a war. In a war one looks after the people who have to fight on the front line. One looks after the productive fighters, namely, the private sector workers. The people of Britain went on short rations to keep their fighting men in the air and on the seas. The Irish people are now being asked that the people on the front line, the soldiers of the private sector - the only place where wealth is generated - should be taxed more while the unemployable and the unemployed are to be crucified as well but the layabout uncle in the attic who goes out to put the odd bet on a horse and is kept as a kind of indigent relative is to be looked after and allowed to batten on the household. It is like a household where one man is going out to work and killing himself while he is carrying a sick brother and he has a layabout uncle in the attic who gets up in the middle of the day to go out to the bookmaker's shop and comes back home for the rest of the day. If one thinks that is unfair to the public sector one should read through the reports, listen to the anecdotal evidence and to what the President says. She has always had her finger on the pulse. Any President who shops in Arnotts is a woman who knows what is going on. Everyone knows that the public sector is not fit for purpose. Everyone knows it is overpaid. What angers the public is not so much the pay gap - I do not wish to touch public sector pay at the moment - but the constant spectacle of exodus from the public sector by middle managers grabbing their pensions and running. It is the pension that really drives the private sector mad.

I do not believe for a second that the Government proposes to take on that minority class. It is afraid of the public sector unions. It is afraid of those people it thinks can paralyse the country when in fact it should tell them to do their damnedest and face them down. The Government is afraid of the public sector. What baffles and astonishes me as a spin doctor and political strategist is what a Fianna Fáil and Green Party Government which by common consensus is facing destruction at the polls has to lose by taking on that minority. Why does it not take on that minority in the interests of the majority, the 1.1 million productive workers who go out to work every morning, who are the only source of wealth in this country? They are not sexy. They are not attractive. They do not have special access to RTE and The Irish Times or other public sector or semi-public sector mentalities. They are the lost people. The people who drive this country are the multinationals, the financial services sector and small and medium enterprises. They are the only sources of wealth. They are the fighting troops. They should be looked after in this budget, but no, the Government is craven.

As long as I have been in the Seanad I have watched the Government and all the other political parties - Fine Gael and Labour are no different - and heard the emollient speeches and the failure to crunch the numbers in the Labour Party. Deputy Bruton has promised that there would be a Minister for public service reform. What I want to know is how many public sector workers the Government will fire. Why should there be voluntary redundancies? Why should there not be involuntary redundancies for people who do not do their day's work? There are such redundancies every day in the private sector. Why is there one law for one class of Irish people and a different law for another class? Why is the Government and the political class so afraid of them? What are they afraid of? There are only 380,000 of them. Half of them are badly paid and should be looked after but the other half of the public sector is sitting fat. One can download their wage rates. One can earn €100,000 a year for six hours teaching a week. People are retiring on pensions of €155,000. What world is the Government living in that it is looking after such people?