Inside Politics:The extraordinary lack of political judgment that prompted the Taoiseach and his Ministers to accept lavish pay increases last October has undermined their moral authority to deal with public servants' outrage over the benchmarking report.
It was not as if the report should have come as any great surprise to the Government. The decision of the body not to give the vast majority of public servants another generous pay rise, on top of what they will obtain through national agreements, was widely expected.
It is an established fact that most public servants are now better paid than comparable private sector workers. On top of that, they have security of tenure and pensions that the benchmarking body conservatively calculated as being worth an extra 12 per cent of salary.
In the light of such evidence there was no basis for the benchmarking body to come up with pay awards for most grades.
On one level the report came as a relief to the Government, given the wider economic context with falling tax revenues and more difficult conditions likely to prevail in the economy for the next 12 months. The problem, though, is how it is going to cope with the prospect of industrial relations chaos across the public service.
This is what makes the Government's initial response to its own pay award so extraordinary. If ever proof was needed that too long in power removes those involved from everyday reality, the decision to rubber-stamp the report of the body on higher remuneration for the public service was it.
It is almost unbelievable that the Taoiseach and his Ministers could not see that by making themselves the highest-paid politicians in the democratic world, they would forfeit the right to tell those far less fortunate than themselves to tighten their belts. The token gesture of deferring the pay rises for a year came too late to have any credibility.
Contrast the approach of the Irish Government to that of the government in our neighbouring island. Last weekend the prime minister Gordon Brown urged MPs not to accept any pay award from an independent review that would be greater than those awarded to public servants.
Encouraging politicians to accept a pay rise of less than 2 per cent, he said they should demonstrate "the discipline that we ask of other people". That is precisely what the Irish Government failed to do.
The really extraordinary thing about it is that Irish Ministers did not see the need to lead by example. How they expect other vested interests to react in other than a purely selfish way is hard to fathom.
Of course it was not just politicians but already very well paid senior civil servants, judges and a range of top public officials who also benefited from the same pay award that applied to Ministers.
In the case of the non-politicians the award was not even deferred. All of which leaves nurses, teachers and a wide swathe of lower- and middle-income public officials with a real sense of grievance that is likely to spill over into industrial action.
By its own actions the Government has made rational debate about the issue of pay in Irish society almost impossible. It is clear from the response of the public sector unions that they do not accept some of the basic facts enumerated by the benchmarking body. It would have been helpful to have a genuine debate based on facts rather than emotion, but that has now become difficult.
One of the structural problems that has developed in the Irish economy over the past decade has been the growing disparity between the pay and conditions that apply to the bulk of those working in the public and private sectors. Leaving pay aside, the level of pension provision and job security that applies across the public service is something the vast majority of private sector workers can only dream about.
A recognition of the facts by all those who benefit from the way taxpayers' money is spent is vital if we are to have even the beginning of a genuine debate about how resources should be allocated fairly in the future. For the country to come through the tougher times ahead with its prosperity intact social solidarity of a high order will be required from all.
That is why the lack of leadership shown by those in authority is so depressing. Why should the bulk of public servants bring themselves to face reality when those charged with leading the country showed no capacity to do so either?
Of course, politicians are not the only privileged group to look after themselves. The professionals at the top of the economic tree, like lawyers and doctors, have shown a voracious appetite for accumulating wealth over the past decade, much of it funded either directly or indirectly by the taxpayer.
The way in which tribunal lawyers defied Government attempts to rein in their grossly inflated fees, or the manner in which hospital consultants have fought tooth and nail to protect their exorbitant incomes, puts the politicians in the halfpenny place.
The difference, though, is that our political leaders have been elected to represent the community as a whole and not just their own vested interests.
Public service is a very different, and much more noble, calling than the naked pursuit of money, which is why the salaries of our political leaders and top public servants should not be compared with those in the higher reaches of professional or business life. This was one flaw at the heart of the higher remuneration body report.
The fundamental flaw in the process, though, was that the Government proved incapable of seeing the problem. It showed how far out of touch with the reality of workers' lives most Ministers had become.
That failure of leadership is one for which the country may ultimately have to pay dearly.