Irish Politicians in the Poor House

Despite public disquiet that the 7 Junior Ministers that were given the boot by Brian Cowen today are each going to receive a payment of €53,000 each, essentially getting over 1.5 times the average industrial wage as a lump sum because they were unable to do a decent job, Mary Harney thinks that the payments, along with the long service payments that TD's receive, are perfectly kosher.

On Newstalk news bulletins yesterday she said that the public have to bear in mind that "Politics is a short term deal" and that many people, when not re-elected, "have nothing to fall back on." She assured us, however, that Irish politicians were "value for money."

"A short term deal." This from the woman who was first elected to the Daíl as a Fianna Faíl TD in 1981. Twenty eight years on, numerous government positions, and Mary will no doubt retire with a pension of a couple of hundred thousand.

In turn she will leave us a health service that she has decimated, overseeing the creation of Ireland's first super-quango, the HSE. At the time Mary created the HSE, she failed to ensure that the savings and centralisation promised were delivered and as a result we are left with an estimated 17,000 too many middle managers and not enough money to pay for front line civil servants. You know, those nice Nurses, Doctors etc that make sure that people stay alive when they enter the health system. Who needs those show-offs anyway?

Yet, despite the fact that the HSE was set up to de-politicise our health service, Mary also needed a whopping four (four!) junior ministers (three as of the announcement today.) Nothing political about that at all, especially not when you consider that only a handful of FF TD's are not either a junior minister or on a committee. Junior ministers are, lest we forget, those too slow to become a fully fledged waste of space.

As well as a glut of junior ministers, there are also 564 civil servants in the Department of Health, despite the fact that everything is supposedly now handled by the HSE. Unbelievable. That must be the "value for money" she was talking about.

And as for having "nothing to fall back on" when they leave politics, Mary's former PD colleague Tom Parlon doesn't seem to have had any problems in that regard. Parlon, good free marketeer that he was, left a prominent government position in the Office of Public Works to become head of the Construction Industry Federation, on a reported €250,000 a year. No conflict of interest there though.

There are as yet no reports either that former occasional politician Michael McDowell is on the breadline down the law library, and his house in Ranelagh looks no less salubrious than it did when he was a government minister.

Aside from the preposterous idea that our current crop of politicians are value for money, or that anyone from the PD's or FF is somehow going to end up broke if they lose their seat, there are some very clear indications that Mary (and most of her government colleagues) are divorced from the reality of day to day life for the Irish people.

In what job in the real world do you get a lump sum payment of 50% of your basic wage when you are demoted for incompetence? Or what other job can you claim a pension while still working in a highly paid job? Their arrogance and disconnect from what the rest of the country is going through is breathtaking.

Personally I feel very reassured. Thanks for that Mary.