Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel

-- Samuel Johnson

BRIAN Cowen began his speech on the Budget on Wednesday as Gaeilge, 12 paragraphs of it. Then he started in earnest. "Stepping outside the confines of party politics...", he said, and when he did, depressingly, you just knew where he was going.

Within minutes he did what they always do in Dail Eireann: in what passes for debate there, he stepped back into the narrow confines of political party hackery.

Richard Bruton, he said, had said Fine Gael would not raise taxes: "That can only mean they were in favour of further expenditure cuts...", effectively a challenge to Bruton to tell the electorate what he would cut.

And later still Cowen had another go, reminding Fine Gael that when they were in power 12 years ago the standard tax rate was 26 per cent.

After 11 years of uninterrupted power, after the wasted decade of the Celtic Tiger, fuelled by Cowen's unsustainable housing bubble, all the Taoiseach had to offer was this: people had paid more tax under Fine Gael 12 years ago, and if Fine Gael thought what Fianna Fail was now doing was wrong, they should say what they would cut, exposing themselves too, to the wrath of the electorate.

Fine Gael TDs, meanwhile, worked themselves into a frenzy, but failed to point to the elephant in the room, the elephant in the Taoiseach's speech actually, reform of the public sector.

Instead we got this: "Ya let the midlands down," from a backbench Fine Gael TD apoplectic at the closure of the army barracks in Longford.

The biggest economic crisis in a generation, maybe longer, is gripping the country -- it is going to get worse now, as a result of this Budget -- and all we got in Dail Eireann last week was party politics in its tiresome glory.

The Dail debate, therefore, was not about the closure of an army barracks in Longford per se, or about the entitlement of 70-year-olds, who had paid taxes and pension contributions all their lives -- how patriotic is that? -- or, indeed, about any of the other crude measures introduced in this shambolic Budget.

The real debate was about what it has always been about under our flawed political system: it was about the local elections next year and the general election two years after that; it was about votes, bums on seats, and egos.

More than that, it was actually about fooling an apathetic electorate yet again, as they have always been fooled, perhaps since the foundation of the State.

Here is an example of how the electorate was fooled before and is now fooled again.

In the 1977 general election campaign, Gerry Collins ran an advertisement in his local newspaper saying Fianna Fail was not offering "pie-in-the-sky promises such as no rates". Within hours his party had added the abolition of residential rates to its growing list of election promises, which included the scrapping of car tax.

Safely returned to power, the economy on the rocks, Fianna Fail quadrupled the car registration fee. When he was accused of re-introducing car tax, the then Finance Minister, Gene Fitzgerald, replied: "It's not a tax. It's a car registration fee."

Now we are told Brian Lenihan's income tax increase is not a tax increase, but an income levy. The hypocrisy is breathtaking; it would be laughable if it were not now so damaging.

The real debate among our parish pump politicians last week was actually about power for power's sake, but not about authority.

Authority rests with the civil service, which drafted the Budget, as it has nearly always done, informed by its own simplistic agenda -- the easy option of fleecing those in the unprotected real economy, to balance the books, and to further protect themselves, the centrepiece of a grotesquely fattened public sector.

In that regard then it was such a civil service Budget, depressingly so, merely topped and tailed by the grating rhetoric of Brian Cowen, as parroted by Brian Lenihan, with its cynical call to patriotic action.

As of June this year, a total of 262,600 people were employed in the public sector, excluding health, compared to 254,000 last year, an increase of 8,600.

Just over 100,000 are now employed in the education sector; well over another 100,000 are now employed in the health sector.

Yet class size in our primary schools were increased in the Budget; yet the elderly are having their medical cards withdrawn to save €100m.

The elderly are being mugged while e-voting machines which cost €52m are lying in storage at a cost of €800,000 a year; while the PPars debacle, which cost €230m is quietly forgotten; while the Health Service Executive forks out over €140m a year to hire agency workers to cover for absentee workers in just 10 hospitals.

And while the daddy of them all, the Mahon tribunal, still fulminates, at a cost of €1bn, and nothing is done to deal with the problem the tribunal was set up to investigate -- payments to politicians -- other than a few laws which, as we now know, the politicians have cynically circumvented by raking in contributions below the declarable threshold.

All of this, this fattening of the public sector, is happening at a time when there is supposed to be a recruitment embargo, and, manifestly, when the service it is supposed to provide has not appreciably improved, or certainly not to the required level, because the Government, successive governments, have shied away, and are continuing to shy away from taking on public sector unions, from wrestling with the beast, because, well, for so many reasons it is just easier to force the private sector to bend over yet again to pick up the tab, as it always has.

The Progressive Democrats, when it was truly a radical party, tried it, of course. In the 1997 election it proposed taking 25,000 people out of the public sector, a suggestion which was lost in the controversy generated over its lone-parents wheeze. The party was virtually decimated at the polls that year. A lesson was learned. The most influential lobby group in the country, the public sector -- not lone parents -- had flexed its muscle.

There are many definitions of patriotism, but the one I most subscribe to was offered by the scholar J Peter Euben, who has written that, for the Greek philosopher Socrates, "patriotism does not require one to agree with everything that his country does and would actually promote analytical questioning in a quest to make the country the best it possibly can be".

It was such philosophy that should have informed the approach of the Opposition as it set about pulling apart this hastily thrown together Budget, thrown together by civil servants while their political puppets were keeping an eye on the banks.

But the Opposition, too, is compromised by the elephant in the room, the critical need for public sector "reform" -- or as Cowen would occasionally have it, "renewal" -- an exercise which should have been undertaken years ago, and which, if it had, would have substantially alleviated the need to do what the Government is now hamfistedly trying to do.

It was compromised because, like all political parties, it too is not only dependent upon the public sector, it is the public sector.

In 2000 Charlie McCreevy, the then Finance Minister, set up the National Pension Reserve Fund to pay for the pensions of those in the public sector, including politicians, who are one of its greatest beneficiaries.

Not only would the privatisation proceeds of Telecom Eireann -- owned by us all, not just the public sector -- kickstart the new fund, McCreevy legislated to pay the equivalent of 1 per cent of GNP into the fund until 2025.

At the moment there is almost €20bn in the fund to pay for the pensions of those in the public sector, including politicians, when they retire.

In the real economy, meanwhile, over 900,000 people have no pension provision at all.

Even in this time of economic crisis the Government has ring-fenced that honey pot of taxpayers' money -- all taxpayers, not just public sector workers -- that is the pension reserve fund.

It is also refusing to touch the semi-state companies -- our companies -- which, if sold off, could probably generate at least €10bn in this time of desperate need.

Temporary access to such funds to stimulate the real economy would have helped get us out of this mess.

"The problem," according to economist Alan McQuaid of Bloxhams, "is that Mr Lenihan appears to take too much heed of what his civil servants say."

He adds: "We continue to question whether in the current uncertain climate where many private-sector workers have lost their jobs, and many more are likely to do so before the crisis is over, that those in the 'sheltered sector' (ie: civil servants) should be allowed make the policy decisions that will impact on the 'non-sheltered' part of the economy."

McCreevy's pension fund stroke was not the only significant decision taken in 2000.

In December of that year the Public Service Benchmarking Body was asked to undertake a fundamental examination of the pay of public service employees vis-a-vis the private sector.

This was around the time of the dotcom bubble, when pimply whipper-snappers everywhere were making vast fortunes from the comfort of their bedsits.

Their former teachers, crusty in their corduroy jackets, resented it; they wanted a slice of the action, arrogantly fuming in their staffrooms that they were better than those snot-nosed kids who had spent their time smoking in the jacks.

Bertie Ahern did not want the hassle, so he set up the benchmarking body.

Economist Jim O'Leary was a member of the body for a period. He resigned before it reported. But in 2004, O'Leary, with two colleagues, published the results of six months' research into public-private sector pay differentials.

The core finding was that on average, public servants earned 13 per cent more than their private sector counterparts on a like-for-like basis in 2001.

The researchers also discovered that the size of this margin in 2001 was not significantly different from what it had been in 1994, suggesting that pay increases in the public sector had kept pace with the private sector throughout the Celtic Tiger period.

The Public Sector Benchmarking Body recommended pay increases which averaged 9 per cent across the grades examined, which cost €1.2bn a year. We are still paying for it, now more than ever, old dears with their medical cards.

Davy Stockbrokers recently said that Irish public sector pay is on average around 120 per cent of private sector earnings, having risen from 113 per cent in the past five years.

The biggest joke of all was that the benchmarking body did not take any account of the unique public pension scheme, never mind the issue of job security.

Another scandal is that the quid pro quo for these unwarranted pay increases -- reform of the public sector with credible job targets and accountability -- never actually took place.

Review after review was ordered, most notably from the lofty OECD which produced a report after consultation with senior civil servants here. But the OECD will get annoyed if it is suggested that they were actually nobbled by those civil servants.

A list of recommendations was produced, but just as quickly kicked over to a Task Force comprising, among others, five civil servants.

Ministers and Ministers of State, meanwhile, have nearly 130 civil servants and privately recruited staff working on constituency matters in their departments, scouring death notices, filling pot-holes and claiming credit, all at a cost to the Exchequer of at least €4m every year, which, in itself, is not only another indictment of the public sector but also of the political system itself.

- Jody Corcoran