Notes on the Front

Pat Leahy opines in the recent Sunday Business Post:

The challenge for Cowen is to give leadership in these circumstances of real threats to our national interest. It won’t be easy. For example, it would mean not just having the political bottle to introduce cuts to some of the more bloated areas of public expenditure, but also having the discipline and the communications strategy to explain them.

Bloated public expenditure.  Cut public expenditure.  Freeze public servants’ pay.  Cut the size of the public sector.  This mantra just runs and runs and the Left hides in the long grass.

Strangely enough, there assistance is at hand in the form of the OECD.  Now this august organisation could hardly be considered a bastion of statism.  It’s neo-liberalism is well known (though there are signs recently they are taking baby steps away from this position).  Remember its recent report on the Irish public sector?  It was anxiously awaited by right-wing commentators who were hoping for a feast of anti-public sector facts and figures.  Instead, they got tofu.  The report’s findings are extremely educational:

• Ireland has one of the lowest level of public sector employment in the OECD (i.e. industrialised nations).
• Ireland has one of the lowest levels of public expenditure in the OECD. We’d have to spend up to €17 billion more per year just to reach the average OECD level.
• The cost of public sector pay has fallen as a percentage of national wealth.
• You want to talk about productivity? The civil service increased by 10% between 1995 – 2005, while the population increased by 15%.

The OECD report on the public sector contains analysis and recommendations which need to be considered seriously. Many of their proposals have little to do with the work of public servants and a lot to do with the policies they are forced to implement by their Ministers – polices that muck up efficiency (de-centralisation being only one of many). 

However, it’s a 370 page report – a big ask for right-wing commentators who would rather bleat their bleats rather than study in depth what is right with the public sector and what is wrong.  Better to repeat ad nauseum – public sector bad, public sector bad.

Trade unions, the Labour Party and the Left, progressives everywhere should just tell these propagandists to get stuffed.  And on the way, tell the truth about why we need a growing, vibrant public sector to get us out of this recession which has been caused by listening to the those anti-public sector propagandists in the first place.