SUNDAY: Like all columnists I am lucky to get feedback. And it usually takes a few days. But this morning I have quite a few follow-ups, mostly from Fianna Fail activists, agreeing with what I have to say in today's Sunday Independent.

All agree the measure should be dropped "without footdragging, without footnoting, without fiddling with the fine print". All agree that it came from a civil service mindset. All agree that if "Government want to get tough they should get tough with bankers and civil servants rather than pensioners and potential hospital patients".

So I tune into RTE's News at One thinking that Gerard Barry will ask the Taoiseach how highly paid civil servants were left off the hook while pensioners were put through the mill. But what I hear is one of the worst interviews I can remember on RTE radio.

Barry never brings up public sector pay reform. Instead he indulges himself in a show-off parade of soporific and irrelevant statistics which must have caused a massive switch-off. And, in doing so, he does the Taoiseach no favours -- for two reasons.

First, because the Taoiseach could not resist the temptation to talk like an accountant. Second, because it was an ideal moment for the Taoiseach to tell the country that he was going to take on the cushioned class rather than the coping class. (Joan Burton should note that both terms are my coinage and may be borrowed, but I would like a small screen credit.)

The cushioned class are the padded public sector class. And I do not mean frontline workers like gardai, teachers and nurses. I mean the thousands of functionaries whose functions are mysterious to outside observers -- as indeed they are to themselves when they take a minute to think about it.

This cushioned class -- which includes some of the staff of RTE -- will live comfortably through this recession, while the coping class will live in struggle and stress. And that is not sharing the pain. Accordingly, the only way the Government will win back public trust is to take on that padded public sector and make them march for their money.

Let's see the cushioned class looking up at Government buildings instead of looking out.

MONDAY

RTE's reluctance to make public sector reform a major priority in its coverage of the Budget is based on its protected position in the public sector. So it is pretty brazen of Noel Curran, Managing Director of RTE television, as reported in today's Irish Times, to use the Cleraun Media Conference as a platform to attack any proposal to give TV3 a share of the television licence -- on which RTE has long held a monopoly.

In recent months it has seemed to me that RTE is pursuing a two-pronged strategy: to protect the public sector in its news and current affairs coverage (Prime Time is the sole exception), and to protect its monopoly of the licence fee. Neither of these strategies serves the public interest.

Actually, what will truly serve the public interest is two independent competing commercial services, with the licence fee fairly split three ways -- between RTE, TV3, and the hardworking independent sector which is far too dependent on the favours of petty bureaucrats in Montrose.

Like civil service reform, reform of RTE would reward those actually producing programmes and give a reality check to those with merely administrative functions. Let 100 creative flowers bloom and let 1,000 weeds die.

TUESDAY

To the Senate to take a cut at both Government and Opposition. The Fianna Fail Senators show good grace when I call the Government's handling of the medical card "graceless and grudging". But when I point out that Fine Gael's health spokesperson, Dr James Reilly, is compromised by his IMO past, Fine Gael Senators shout me down -- a sure sign that I have found a sore spot.

Fine Gael also challenges my contention that it flunked the public sector pay issue. Possibly some spokesperson said something about the public finances, and I missed it. But if they had clearly called for a public sector pay freeze, I would have heard all about it -- from the public sector unions.

Let me sum up. The three main parties and RTE are in an objective conspiracy to protect the public sector, whose pay and pensions consume half of all current expenditure. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are afraid of the public sector vote, Labour is ideologically locked into protecting public sector unions, and RTE -- part of the public sector -- avoids the subject like the plague.

But public sector pay reform won't go away, because it can't go away -- and it can't go away because we are nearly broke. So that fat cat will have to be belled. Soon.

WEDNESDAY

Let other pens wax lyrical about the meaning of the march on Leinster House. What worries me is why the Government got it so wrong. How could cabinet ministers allow civil servants to blind them to this simple truth: as you get older you worry less about sex and the city, and more about money and health?

How could the Government not know that the medical card gives security, and helps older people sleep at night? And how could it get it wrong by whingeing about the wealthy? As Pat Rabbitte remarked, if Michael Smurfit broke his leg he would not be waving his medical card.

Roisin Shortall gave me the answer. She said that Bertie Ahern would not have made that mistake because Bertie Ahern understood human nature. And of course that's why he made a success of the peace process. Not just by understanding nationalists, but by understanding unionists.

Tonight at TCD, in the course of a debate on a United Ireland, in a moving speech Ahern pays tribute to two great unionist leaders, James Craig and Edward Carson:

"We should acknowledge that they always acted in the interests of the people they represented, as they saw them. We should also acknowledge they are as much a part of our shared history as Wolfe Tone, Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera."

THURSDAY

One of Mr Ahern's admirers is David Adams, former loyalist turned fine political columnist. In today's Irish Times, Adams argues, convincingly, against the proposal for a Truth Commission. He says it will be politicised by Sinn Fein, will corrode relations between the two communities, and is far too close in time.

Adams is correct in thinking it too close. In the Irish Republic, any attempt to raise the murder of southern Protestants in the period 1920-23 is met with poisonous propaganda from sectarian nationalists. So let's point no fingers.

FRIDAY

A polite phone call from Philip Keavney of Sligo ICMSA asking me to attend a briefing session on the Budget. Although I am sceptical of special pleading by farmers, Philip gets my full attention by pointing out that while farm subsidies were cut by 17 per cent, the Department of Agriculture cut its own spend by only 1 per cent.

Later that afternoon, my wife comes back from a wasted trip to argue a bill with Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Council waste disposal department. Wasted because she got there at 4.05pm and their hours are from 10am until 4pm. Now you know why I call it the cushioned class.