It's not that they're stupid or uncaring, but Brian Cowen and his ministers don't get it. Nor do the bankers or the builders, or the pillars of society proudly announcing their voluntary pay cuts and urging everyone to "share the pain". They don't get it, and as a consequence they're playing with fire.

On Friday, a State outfit called Ciroc issued a report. It should be kept in a museum, as an example of how out of touch the establishment is with recession Ireland.

Here's what they don't get. We weren't in the game. But we get to pay the bill.

This is dangerous. It's so fundamentally unfair, and clearly understood to be unfair, that it risks disaffection and alienation on a scale never before seen in this country.

What's the game and who's playing it? What's Ciroc and why should it stick its report where the sun don't shine?

Here's the game. The bankers made fortunes borrowing billions abroad, to lend to builders. The builders made fortunes selling houses to people anxious not to be excluded forever from the property ladder. The banks made another fortune inflating loans to sell to the anxious house-buyers. The builders and estate agents inflated house prices and increased their fortunes.

The politicians encouraged all this, with reckless tax policies and deliberately lax regulation.

This on its own would be bad enough, but the game got wilder. An enormous service industry grew up around the property boom -- architects, lawyers, insurers, lobbyists, PR and image maintenance. The pay of senior bankers and top executives throughout the business world rocketed in sympathy. Soon, in those circles, a salary of half a million was the sign of a loser. A wage for the job wasn't enough, there had to be bonuses. And massive pensions.

This was all separate from the financial partying of bankers like dear old Seanie Fitz, busily getting creative with figures.

An enormous culture of entitlement grew up around this nonsense. To rise into the top layers of many businesses was not to get a job, with appropriate pay -- it was to be handed a winning lottery ticket. You were set for life.

This culture of entitlement -- in truth, a culture of looting -- spread through the professions, through private and public sectors, into the top layers of the civil service. Politicians joined in. Executive and professional pay began to relate not to the earnings of those at the coal-front, but to the inflated salaries, bonuses

and pensions of the absurdly overpaid top layers. Money breeds money -- and the elite speculated on property here and abroad, running up huge profits while it lasted.

The great money game was played by a thin layer at the top. Lower level civil servants, for instance, got an ordinary wage. Below the top layers of barristers, lawyers often do useful, necessary work for a surprisingly small fee.

Pop -- the bubble burst. Now, says the Government, who're we going to get to clean up this mess?

We weren't in the game. But we get to pay the bill.

Simultaneously, similar games in the USA created a spreading recession, so Irish exports collapsed and before the end of the year there'll be half a million unemployed, and counting. Fear and depression spread. Some won't ever work again. No holidays, no Christmas, education plans for kids on hold. How many of our kids will emigrate when the global economy picks up?

The Government is afraid to borrow more to try to stimulate growth, because it's already borrowing billions to recapitalise the banks.

Those in work have wages cut, taxes are going up. Hospital services shrink; now they're going to cut social welfare. At every corner, there's some well-fed gobshite urging us to "share the pain".

Enter Ciroc -- the Covered Institutions Remuneration Oversight Committee. And it recommends that the pay of the heads of AIB and Bank of Ireland be capped at €690,000. Guess how much the head of AIB thinks he's worth now -- €696,300. So, Ciroc recommend a pay cut of €6,300. A whopping cut of 0.9 per cent.

Even Brian Lenihan is embarrassed. He "suggests" €500,000 is enough. Half a million, for bankers with a proven record of incompetence.

In a country where people will die on hospital waiting lists. Lenihan thinks this is "appropriate". Fine Gael says €250,000, itself an absurd overpayment.

It's outrageous that this is even an issue.

Of course, the argument goes, we have to pay these people big bucks or they'll leave. Really? Good riddance. Besides, where will they go? To the USA, where upwards of 200,000 bankers are on the dole? And they'll be asked for a CV. "I ran an Irish bank," they'll say proudly. When the interview panel stops laughing they'll ask these lads why they left. "Well, they wouldn't pay me enough money."

This is farce. The elite are being protected from their own folly to an astonishing extent -- and we, who weren't in the game, get to pay the bill.

Look at the ministerial pensions. Paid to people with well-paid jobs. The latest State Finance Accounts has Charlie McCreevy, who gets a whopping salary from the EU, down for a State pension of €70,710. John Bruton, also in a high-paying EU job -- a €94,627 pension.

Sitting TDs are listed for pensions. Eamon Gilmore -- €5,812. Ruairi Quinn -- €44,171. Mary O'Rourke -- €53,622, Richard Bruton -- €14,041. And so on and so on.

Peter Sutherland, who recently lectured us all on the need to tighten belts, is an enormously successful and rich lawyer and banker. He's listed for a State pension of €49,791 -- this, presumably, comes from his two years and eight months as attorney general back in the early 1980s.

Then there are the crazy expenses for ministers, the helicopters, the jets, the premium air fares, the State cars and full-time drivers, the nixers, the committee jobs for the boys. The culture of entitlement is endless.

At the top of every hierarchy, whether in the public or private sector, there's a layer of overpaid people who are untouchable. There are policies -- such as the hundred million annual subsidy to exclusionary schools, the carefully constructed tax avoidance

laws -- that are untouchable.

Many in that top layer seem to think that a deep, long recession is "a challenge". No, it's deadening, hopeless, dangerous.

Applying "across the board" cuts isn't the point. A cut of 10 or 20 per cent makes no difference to this layer. When they "share the pain" it means instead of a €63 bottle of wine with dinner they'll endure a bottle of €48 plonk.

They'll sail unhurt through this. And people who weren't in the game -- many even unaware that the game was going on -- see their families destroyed.

Here's where that's dangerous.

Remember O'Connell Street, February 2006, a Saturday afternoon, a handful of Continuity IRA sympathisers, plus a few hundred disaffected inner city youths hanging around to see what would happen? The Dublin riots were a sudden, unexpected explosion of violence, then it all went quiet. They haven't gone away, you know.

In the 1980s there was an illusion that we were all in it together -- the truth of the widespread tax fraud wasn't understood. Today, the unfairness of what's happening is blatant.

The existence of huge wealth can't be denied. Also, we have expectations now that we didn't have then. And there are headbangers mooching around disaffected, resentful youths, with a view to recruiting cannon fodder for their war against pizza delivery people.

The Government could have started at the top and cut savagely -- particularly among those prominent in the great money game. Instead, it takes the usual route -- social welfare, education, health.

It's a gamble. Another game. And even more dangerous.