Last week, while I was interviewing Pat Kenny and Eamon Dunphy, the subject of money came up, writes Kathy Sheridan
Kenny stoutly defended his earnings, while not revealing the extent of them. "In terms of bangs for the buck I'm probably worth what I earn. I don't get paid as much as certain CEOs, or certain high-flying barristers, or certain industrialists around here \ who earn 10 times what I do but whose names I don't even know. They're never in the papers.
"I'm slagged off for what I earn and yet if Colin Farrell makes $8 million for a movie that took three weeks to make, there isn't a bip about it. I don't really understand why if a footballer gets paid £50,000 to £100,000 a week - which is a scandalous amount of money - it's 'good on you, Damien, good on you, Roy'. I just don't understand why there is that double standard "
He has a point.
I know that Eamon Dunphy was getting about £200,000 for presenting The Last Word four or five years ago because he told me so. He was able to demand that for about 10 hours of radio a week, he claimed, only because RTÉ had set the local going rate for "stars": "All those RTÉ stars were getting vast sums of money for presenting radio programmes, in a monopoly, with no opposition till very recent times".
When a Scottish Radio Holdings (SRH) executive was sent over to examine the books, he was stunned at Dunphy's pay. The Irishman's equivalent in SRH's Radio Clyde was on £50,000.
As so often, Dunphy manages to have his cake and eat it, but he has a point, too. And it's not limited to media organisations, state or private.
Who struck the RTÉ star rate to begin with? By what alchemy is the going rate set for any high-flying position, in any company? We know that many CEOs' earnings, for example, bear no relation to their success rate, so who decides what they get (not just salary, but the equally lucrative bonuses/pensions/hidden perks combo)? Are company directors anything more than nodding dogs, guaranteeing their own healthy fees and perks by ensuring that the boss gets an ego-boosting package?
The subject of who earns how much, how and why, is not mere gossip fodder for chippy Joes and Josephines. Disproportionate pay gaps matter. It's hardly news that social mobility increases most in the countries with the smallest gap between the richest and the poorest. Look no further than pay ratios (and, by the way, intensive, pre-school childcare that everyone uses) in Sweden, for proof that social norms can be set to boost greater equality of income.
It is astonishing that the secretive nature of the benchmarking committee's deliberations did not trigger national outrage.
If we cannot have openness from the public sector in such far-reaching matters, how can we expect it of the private sector?
This becomes more than academic in a week when Willie O'Dea, the Minister of State at the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, announced an investigation into the earnings gap between male and female graduates. An ESRI study showed that women who graduated in 1992 were, within six years, earning 18 per cent less than their male counterparts. This study is compelling because, given the youth of the graduates, the gap cannot be explained away by the usual oul' womanly carry-on of babies or part-time working.
Already, reasons such as career choice, employers' recruitment practices and gender stereotyping within the workplace are being touted as likely causes, and chances are they will all feature at some level. But these are as likely to raise as many questions as they answer.
If, say, the gap is due to women choosing the so-called "soft" careers, shouldn't the next question be, who or what kind of society defines what is "soft"? Who defined "hard", and deemed it deserving of a seven-figure income?
I'm guessing that "hard" would be a job with international brokers, Cantor Fitzgerald. "The office culture is based entirely upon the making of money both for the company and for yourself," pronounced an English judge in the case of a traumatised (male) director against the company. Foul-mouthed abuse and startling amounts of cocaine and alcohol amid regular trips to lap-dancing clubs for "networking" purposes were only the half of it. The director, of course, needed intensive psychiatric help (and a million in damages) to get over it.
On Payfinder.com, which allows people to see what their peers get paid, it seems that men in banking and finance are way ahead of women. How does one explain the pay gap of 50 per cent in favour of men in public relations, an arena brimming with women?
What's a woman to do? Hark to the radio ad, I say: "Pity ... those golf outings are good for networking," says an oily senior type, presuming that the young go-getter is too studies-bound to make the work do on Saturday. Aha. But not only is our young man going golfing, ladies, he's "paired off with one of the directors". "Hard," eh?