There are two sides to the debased coin of our vanquished economy – and both factions are engaged in all-out war, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE.
AMAZINGLY, THERE is a byproduct of the economic cataclysm that has not been examined, parsed and analysed on our national airwaves or in our newspapers. You might find this hard to believe, as the country huddles together to shout at the television during Primetime, and every dog in the street has a view on the advisability of corralling toxic debt. But it is true. No one is talking about the bitterness between public sector workers and private sector workers.
It goes without saying that everyone hates the bankers and the Government. The bankers are too well-paid to care very much and the Government must be resigned, after everything it failed to do, to public anger (see last week's opinion poll in The Irish Times). Certainly both the politicians and the bankers must be grateful that public lynching has been banned in this country for some time – although public lynching was terribly cheap, when you think about it, and provided a cathartic public spectacle for a dangerous and potentially destructive mob.
But the division between public sector workers and private sector workers is something else again. On the one hand, you have public service workers seeing the pension levy leech on to some modest wage packets. On the other, you have private sector workers waiting for their company to make them redundant and bracing themselves for a teachers’ strike.
“Oh, the Government doesn’t care if the teachers strike,” said a friend of mine briskly. “All they care about is us paying the national debt.”
We were talking about the divide between public sector and public sector workers. We were shouting at each other down the phone.
On RTÉ Radio 1's Playbackprogramme 10 days ago, Ruth Buchanan played an extract from the Livelineprogramme. It was a characteristically shrewd choice. Celine, a public sector worker, is a single woman earning about €40,000 per annum. Her pension levy comes to about €50 per week. She has given up her cable television. She goes out once a month, she told Joe Duffy, and brings her recession bottle with her – a naggin of spirits in her handbag. Dinners in the hospital where she works – Celine agreed they were subsidised – had gone up from €2.55 to €3.95, she told Joe, as private sector workers sliced their sandwiches with sudden vigour. Celine now brings her recycling into the hospital with her, because she can't afford the bin charges.
Celine was outraged and wounded. Her frankness was striking, and fatal. A taxi driver came on the phone to Livelineto say she should stop complaining. She earned the same as he did, he said. Celine said she worked 35 hours a week. The taxi driver (I did not hear his name) said that he worked 70 hours a week. They were shouting at each other down the phone as well. It was a devastating exchange.
The division encapsulated by Celine’s phone call and the subsequent row has been blurred a little since, principally by new job losses and fresh scandals – we need bow to no country about the freshness of our scandals.
However, private sector workers still view themselves as the people who were at the sharp edge of the boom and, consequently, at the sharp edge of the bust.
They could be fired from their jobs; their jobs could be moved at their employers’ whim; their pensions were low or left up to themselves. In the good times, many of them, notably those in the construction industry, made a fortune.
During the boom, the public sector workers felt that they had been overtaken. Once-prestigious jobs in education, health, and to a certain extent in the Garda Síochána – all sectors of the public service with which private sector workers have become profoundly disillusioned – were no longer viewed as great jobs.
However, their job security was – and is – total, even when they fail to notify the Minister for Finance of Anglo Irish Bank receiving rather large deposits from Irish Life Permanent. Their pensions are generous, to put it mildly.
Every private sector worker knows (or believes that they know) of a public sector worker who has retired at 50 to have a grand old time of it – or to get another job – at the public’s expense.
Every public sector worker feels that they are now paying for a boom from which they never benefited.
Just as it is the private sector worker’s belief that when the unions got into bed with the Government, private sector workers were left outside on the landing.
This is going to make for some interesting family dinners, isn’t it? This is going to make for some eventful wedding celebrations. Because this isn’t some theoretical divide, but one which slices through Irish families much harder than Bord Snip ever will.
If the Taoiseach really wants us to come through this feeling “proud of the fact that when things tightened, and the strain came on our backs, we pulled together” then he’d better start thinking about the rows and the resentments that are simmering around the Sunday roasts.