The Hubble telescope has been one of the most brilliant technological successes of the entire space programme, giving astronomers more information about the universe and the origins thereof than ever before. We in Ireland cannot boast of any instrument of such depth of perception: but at least our national broadcaster has given us the opposite technology. Viewing the world entirely from the viewpoint of the Dublin Bubble, the RTE newsroom has given us the Dubble.

The Dubble has a range of about three miles, namely the radius of the Dublin Bubble, from the Montrose Tower to Liberty Hall. It was working overtime last Friday, as Radio One's 'News at One' supplied a live, on-the-spot voice report from the gathering of the demonstrators to protest against government policies. "Unfortunately," said the reporter, "the bad weather is keeping the numbers of protesters down."

"Unfortunately"? Yes, it was an unscripted piece, but that "unfortunately" told us precisely where the reporter's sympathies lay. More of the same was evident when he declared that James Larkin's statue was looking on approvingly as the demonstrators marched past. It takes real Dubble-vision to conflate the locked-out labourers of 1913 with the locked-in public servants of 2009, they who cannot be sacked, even for taking a day off work in the middle of a national crisis.

That the vainglorious political syndicalist James Larkin had led his hapless army of workers to an ignominious defeat was probably a historical subtlety lost on the reporter.

Dubble was at its umbiliscopic capers again on Sunday, when the 'News at One' provided a series of vox-pop interviews with the demonstrators of fully two days before. One by one, they were obligingly asked, "Should there be a national strike?", and they obligingly agreed that there should be, that government policies would have to be reversed, that it was time to tax the rich, etc, etc.

This is Dubble-speak at its most toxic, the authentic voice of "the man in the street": but of course it was no such thing. The real man and woman in the street weren't demonstrating on the street at all, but at work in the private sector. For they were scared witless of losing their jobs, and thereby seeing their lives consumed by a financial Armageddon of a kind that no developed economy has experienced since the Second World War. The rest of the real men and women "in the street" were really on the street, having been laid off from their private sector jobs, knowing full well that years might pass before they ever have a meaningful job again.

To be sure, being rational when all around you are behaving irrationally can itself seem to be irrational: and making yourself popular with the mob, as viewed through the Dubblescope, might actually appear to be the very rational option. But there is another world, outside that as seen by the conjoined and optical brotherhood of Liberty Hall and Montrose, a world whose inhabitants are governed by the old-fashioned rules of domestic prudence. If you spend more than you earn, then two alternatives await you: one is a poor house, the other is The Poor House. There is no third option. The public sector is looking at a poor house. Those in the private sector are looking at The Poor House. The two metaphorical dwellings are universes apart: only Dubble-vision can confuse them.

I know some things that must be done: others are beyond my powers of understanding. Certainly, the ludicrous golden handshake to all departing public servants of 150pc of salary, tax free, was a demented concession when it was made, but it is a positively wicked one to continue now.

Every penny of that golden handshake given to a civil servant, who is about to move on to a secure and lifelong pension, will have to be borrowed at punitive rates of interest. Every penny of that loan, vastly increased over time, will then have to be paid for by extractions from the wealth-creating economy, even as it is trying to pay the €11m an hour that the public service is currently costing the state.

A pity, then, that the RTE reporters didn't ask the protesters how many days sick leave they'd taken last year. Because in 2007, three-quarters of all clerical officers missed work through "illness". And the 100,000 employees of the HSE take 100,000 days sick leave a month, and the average amount of annual "sick leave" for all female civil servants was 14 days. But of course, the Dubble-scope doesn't ever see such inconvenient realities.

Look. I don't like saying this, because it won't make me popular with public servants, and I like to be liked, as we all do. But these truths are self-evident to anyone whose eyes are not fixated upon the phantasmagorical images being viewed through the Dubble.

We cannot afford the sickness levels and the golden handshakes that public servants have been getting. And we emphatically cannot allow the demented hallucinations of the Dubble-scope to be confused with the truth. Because if we do, we shall certainly drive the ship of state, engines full-ahead, on to the unforgiving rocks of history: after which, survivors, from within either sector of the economy, may enjoy equally the horrors of The Poor House.

kmyers@independent.ie

Irish Independent