Good article from Fintan o'toole today http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/0531/1224298147947.html?via=mr Ivor Callely will get €63,000 a year for the rest of his life yet Richard Bruton targets the poorest workers WHAT IS the price of a litre of milk? How much does a sliced pan cost? Are baked beans cheaper in Aldi or in Dunnes? What’s the typical bus fare between a working-class city suburb and an industrial estate? There are people who know the answers to these questions and there are those who don’t. And the most nauseating sound in Ireland is the people who don’t, pontificating about the people who do. It is smug, sleek people who live in a bubble of comfort and self-satisfaction deciding that the problem in this bloody country is that the women who clean their offices are paid too much. This is a State in which Ivor Callely, who is so smart he couldn’t quite figure out where he was living, is due to get more than a quarter of a million euro from the taxpayers over the next year as compensation for the fact that he can’t get elected anymore. For the rest of his life, which could be about 40 years, Ivor will get a pension of €63,000 a year. With his lump sums that’s a total of about €2.75 million. Now let’s consider a contract cleaner, whose feathered-bedded status apparently keeps Richard Bruton awake at night. She gets up before dawn or leaves home after dusk to scrub toilets, polish floors and pick up the mess of people she’ll never even see. I’ve never worked as a senator, so I can only imagine the stress that Ivor would have been under trying to work out all those complex expenses claims. But I have worked as a contract cleaner. It is miserable and soul-destroying, and I’d stick my neck out and say it’s a lot harder on the human spirit than waffling in the Senate while doing a bit of property development on the side. Under the wage-setting mechanisms that Richard Bruton sees as such a problem, the contract cleaner gets €370.50 a week and no pension. That’s €770,000 over 40 years. In other words, Ivor will get more than 3½ times for doing nothing at all what the cleaner will get for doing a miserable job in unsocial hours. And which of them does Richard Bruton see as a problem for Ireland, as the one whose over-inflated sense of self-worth must be brought down to size if we are to face reality? Not Ivor, apparently. But then, Ivor, however repellent, is an individual. He’s a person. He has a name. Contract cleaners don’t have names. They are not people. They don’t have kids. They are “units of labour costâ€. They belong to what Charles Dickens in Hard Times calls “the multitude . . . generically called ‘the Hands’ – a race who would have found more favour with some people if providence had seen fit to make them only hands.†What do the Hands need with Sundays? There was a time when it suited the powers that be to grant them Sundays for their spiritual and moral edification. But now that time is gone, Sunday should be just another day for the Hands. Not, mind you, for the Brains who have important things to do on Sundays, like being with their kids or visiting their parents or going to a match or taking a walk. But since the Hands do none of these things, it is clearly extortionate that they should demand extra money for giving up something that couldn’t possibly mean anything to them. What is the agenda in all of this? Ostensibly, it is to create jobs. But as the Kevin Duffy-Frank Walsh report on the subject found, there is simply no evidence that attacking the wages of low-paid workers will lead to a substantial increase in employment. The notion that the Irish low paid are living high on the hog is ludicrous. Hourly labour costs in the hospitality sector, for example, are already the third lowest in the EU. And the evidence shows that workers in the sectors covered by the system are just as likely to have taken wage cuts as those who are not; so much for the need for “flexibilityâ€. Is the agenda, then, to do with the crisis in the public finances? Clearly not: wage cuts will cost the State revenue. According to the think tank Tasc (whose council I chair), the direct cost to the exchequer of cutting a worker from €9.27 an hour to the current minimum wage is €1,865 a year per worker. This is without considering the indirect costs of reduced economic demand and the growth in demand for social services as workers and their families struggle to cope on poverty wages. So if it’s not to do with jobs and it would make the crisis in the public finances worse, why are we even discussing wage cuts for the low paid? Because the crisis is an opportunity to dismantle the minimal protections that vulnerable working people have gained over the last century. Because the elite will sacrifice anyone to protect itself. And because it allows sleek, smug people to look tough while the gravy train still stops at all the right stations.
Needs a strong leader from the left to galvanise the public. Theres always been this I'm alright Jack attitude here which encourages backhanders & corruption. That garda would have went to prison in any other country Callely would have went to prison in any other country Sinn Fein have missed an opportunity here, the sh1te they were spouting about the Queens visit has knocked them back a few years but if they get their act together we could have a strong left leaning government at the next election.
English peer jailed today for 12 months for claiming 11,000 pounds in expenses he wasn't entitled to. What happens here to all those doing it? Fcuk all, we live in a corrupt society where they can do & take what they want with no comeuppance. Disgraceful!
So so true.....callely on 65K a year for the rest of his life...Lowry strolling in and out of the Dail....its disgusting...4,500 waiting on fair deal place... I also see that the "stroke Fahy" has got his conviction quashed! What a fooking country! http://www.rte.ie/news/2011/0531/fahym.html
And these same treasonous scumbags will happily send our working classes out to war. One big difference between our leaders and say their British -or German counterparts is we got burdened with spine-less cnuts and gangsters . I would not look at Prime Time the other night - why drive myself insane over what these heart-less pigs have done to our people and our Country . I genuinely believe we need mass demonstrations and refuse to work till we rid ourselves of this disease in Kildare Street. We would be in the sihthole for a while but where are we now as we take the food from our childrens mouths to pay the gambling debts of fkucing foreigners . Im telling you folks the mob in now dont give a flying fkuc about Irish citizens - we need to act now . And what about those who traditionally represented the working classes - labour and the unions ???? took the buck - thats what those snivelling two faced dogs did to us - abandoned us at our darkest hour . Jem Larkin- James Connolly , what would they say ??? The wealthy pigs along with their servants in political life have ruined us - treasonous dogs . I bleeding hate the lot of em