Catholic Church has lost all credibility, making me a pagan in Ireland

Good pagan that I am, I don't darken the door of my local church from one end of the year to the next. But Christmas is different.

You need the little bit of religion at Christmas time. There's something about going to church on Christmas morning that makes the day complete, even for us atheists and agnostics.

For my teenagers it's a glimpse into a weird world of ritual, of men in frocks and old folk on their knees mumbling strange incantations. At least that's how they see it. It's like stepping into Harry Potter, one of the teens told me last year.

But for me it's a nostalgic journey into the past, evoking deep memories from boyhood days in a small country town, memories of the way we were way back when everything was simpler and somehow more alive.

It all comes flooding back, the early start, the crunch of feet on the icy path, the crib in the nave of the church, the Happy Christmases in the church yard afterwards as neighbors shook hands, and then the quick walk home and opening the door to the smell of the rashers already spitting on the pan.

We used to do midnight Mass when I was a young teenager, but my mother disapproved because a few of the congregation always went straight from the pub to the church and then lacked the requisite reverence.

I can remember at one Christmas Eve midnight Mass the priest intoning the line about the Lamb of God and being answered by a chorus of Baa! Baa! from the boyos in the balcony. A few minutes later someone dropped a bottle of beer at the top of the balcony staircase and it slowly rattled its way down every step to the bottom. The priest paused the ceremony, turned around and glared, and you could have cut the silence with a knife.

We thought it was brilliant drama and wanted to go back the following year. But from then on it was Christmas morning Mass for our family.

Eventually, of course, we all left home and lost our religion. As students in the radical sixties and seventies, all that crazy stuff about the immaculate conception and transubstantiation was too ridiculous to be taken seriously.

But every Christmas, when we all gathered at home, we went to Christmas morning Mass like true believers because it was part of our growing up, part of what we were.

So for old time's sake -- and to give my own kids the experience -- I still insist on going to church on Christmas morning. We don't limit ourselves to the local Catholic Church. The Protestant Church of Ireland service is much better.

Instead of the muttering and moaning of an interminable mass, the Protestant service is all joyful hymns and carols, with a few prayers in between the singing. It's lively and uplifting.

Mind you, the kids this year say they want to go back to the Catholic Church this Christmas. The Mass is much more mysterious, they say. And you can get Communion!

Maybe we'll go back this year. Because the way the Catholic Church is going here, it may not be around much longer. If it's not gone altogether, it could well be reduced to a small rump by the time my kids have kids of their own to bring to church on Christmas morning.

The recent publication of the state commission of inquiry into the behavior of priests and bishops in the Dublin diocese since 1975 has been a tipping point as far as the Catholic Church in Ireland is concerned. The outcome has rocked the church, not just in Dublin but throughout the country.

It is the second inquiry of its kind here, since the accusations about clerical sexual abuse in Ireland started to snowball about 10 years ago. The first was the inquiry in Wexford and that was shocking.

But the scale and depravity and then the cover-up revealed by the Dublin inquiry is far worse. Dozens of priests were implicated, successive bishops knew what was happening, yet it went on and on.

The numerous abusing priests were shifted from one parish to another when complaints arose, leaving them free to abuse again.

The priority of the church was always to protect itself, even if it meant children continued to suffer.

In the Dublin diocese, which is so big that it has an archbishop at the top and auxiliary bishops as well, meetings between the bishops were held on a monthly basis, and it is hard to believe that the problem of abusing priests would not have been discussed.

The report makes clear that all the archbishops over the past 30 years or more knew what was going on, yet did nothing effective to stop it.

The present archbishop is in the clear because of the new procedures put in place in the recent past for protecting children, part of which means immediate reporting of accusations of abuse by priests to the police. That's a big change from previous decades when the church dealt with these matters itself, under canon law.

But the present archbishop's predecessor, still alive but now retired, is implicated in the cover-up, as are the auxiliary bishops who served under him and are now full bishops in other dioceses around Ireland. One of them has already resigned, after a trip to Rome to consult the Pope, and the other three are hanging on by their fingertips.

As I said, this is a tipping point for the Catholic Church in Ireland. It's a crisis that has shaken the Irish Catholic Church to its foundations and damaged its reputation and standing, perhaps permanently.

One indication of the sea change in attitude to the church is the way people here are now questioning everything. Is it right that the local bishop should be the patron of all the Catholic schools in the area if the church cannot be trusted with children? Should people be taking moral guidance from bishops when the culture in the church was corrupt?

The old deference is now completely gone. The Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheal Martin, for example, publicly criticized the failure of the Papal Nuncio to cooperate with the commission of inquiry and provide access to church files, something which the judge who ran the inquiry commented on. It's a long way from the days when government ministers here used to sink to their knees to kiss the bishop's ring.

This end to the deference and respect that used to be shown to the church is not confined to senior figures like government ministers. Ordinary people -- with the exception of the elderly faithful -- have been scathing in TV news interviews not only about how the church behaved in Dublin, but about the decades of orchestrated cover-up.

The cover-up by bishops is seen by most people as being almost as bad as the abuse perpetrated by so many priests because it left those priests free to abuse again.

The media has been full of calls for bishops to resign, an unprecedented change in attitudes here. And it could get worse for the church because the five-year inquiry in the Dublin diocese is unlikely to be the end of it.

Wexford and Dublin have been dealt with. But what about all the other dioceses in the country?

Given the culture of concealment in the Irish Catholic Church over the last few decades, the presumption must be that all the other dioceses will be just as rotten. There is no reason to think that Wexford and Dublin were aberrations and that everywhere else was okay.

Of course the problem with the Catholic Church goes far beyond these latest revelations in Ireland. It goes right back to the life denying, sex denying, guilt laden culture that permeates the whole institution, the lack of women priests, the lack of married male priests, the whole system that shoved young men into seminaries at a very young age.

With minimal contact with girls and their sexual development arrested in early boyhood, is it any wonder that so many of these priests went on to experiment sexually with children, to be child abusers?

You can suppress sex for so long, but eventually, as Freud correctly insists, it will always find a way out in some form, normal or perverted.

Our tragedy in Ireland was that the suppression by the Catholic Church of a normal healthy attitude to sex was worse here than elsewhere. And the consequences, inevitably, have been worse, a terrible price paid by so many abused children here.

That's a big subject and one we will explore in due course in this column. But it's not one for now, a few days before Christmas.

The Christian message in its pure original form is still one of great merit. And the story of the Nativity and the Baby Jesus is still one that connects with children at this time around the world. I can see it in the eyes of my own kids, even though they have been sent to a non-denominational school and educated to be free thinkers.

Like me, there will be a lot of people in Ireland going to other churches this Christmas. And many of those who go to a Catholic Church will be doing so with a heavy heart.

The first budget cut is the deepest for the Irish public

Given the cutbacks in last week's budget in Ireland, the reaction so far has been surprisingly muted.

It was the toughest budget ever here, with welfare payments cut, the earnings of everyone on the state payroll cut for the second time in a year, and other reductions in state spending that will have a negative impact on the standard of living of almost every citizen.

It was the kind of budget that should have caused uproar. But it didn't.

Why? Well, there are several reasons.

The main reason is that the government had conditioned people to the bad news over the past two weeks. Almost all the cutbacks in the budget had been leaked to the papers in advance, drip-fed to the media in a deliberate softening up process. So when the full details were revealed on budget day the shocking news was no surprise, and not much of a shock either.

The other reason people accepted the cutbacks so calmly was that by now everyone here understands that our budget deficit has to be fixed or else the country will go bankrupt. It's been explained so often in the past few months that everyone here gets it.

We're spending $78.5) billion this year and only taking in $46.5 billion in taxes. No business or household can have a gap like that between spending and income and hope to survive more than a few years. And a country is no different.

Our problem stems from the massive expansion in state spending here during the boom years. The Irish state is still spending at that level even though tax revenue has collapsed over the past two years.

That means state spending now has to be cut back severely, and that was what this budget was all about. The government has not run out of compassion. It has run out of money. And it is a tribute to the good sense of most people in Ireland that they understand that, even though the cutbacks are distressing for some.

As I have explained in this column already, since our property bubble burst in 2008 and our tax revenue started to collapse, we have been paying half our bills with money borrowed from the European Central Bank. To keep the support of the EU we had to agree a program to reduce our budget deficit, and the first step was a €4($5.8) billion cut in the deficit in this budget, to be followed by more billions in cuts each year over the next three or four years.

This program was agreed by our government, but the main opposition parties also accepted it because there is no alternative. We can argue about the detail of how to reduce the deficit, but the need to cut it right back is accepted by everyone, even the Labor Party and Sinn Fein.

In headline terms this year's budget made $5.8 billion worth of savings as follows (in round figures) -- $1.5 billion each from the state payroll, welfare, capital programs and departmental spending.

As predicted here last week, the state payroll cuts were led by Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen and his ministers, with pay cuts of 20% and 15% respectively, although this included the previous 10% voluntary pay cut they took a year ago.

In spite of this example, the loudest immediate reaction was from state workers (teachers, nurses, police, army, civil servants, etc.), some of whom are already threatening to strike.

One can understand that they feel sore since they have already been hit with a 7% cut within the past year. Their pay will now be cut as follows – 5% on the first $43,600, 7.5% on the next $58,000 and 10% on the next $80,000 with a top rate of 15% on those earning in excess of $291,000.

It's a substantial further cut, and it will be hard for the 40% of state workers who are low earners, a lot of whom would be young and would include those who bought into the property market during the boom and are now in negative equity.

But overall there is little public sympathy for them because they have what workers in the rest of the economy don't have -- secure jobs and guaranteed pensions.

And there is also the inconvenient fact that pay for state workers was on average 20% higher than pay for workers in the rest of the economy, and also that most state workers had a 35-hour week, whereas private sector workers were on average doing a 38 hour week.

In spite of this, there is a good chance of strikes by state sector workers in 2010 as the cuts start to bite. A lot of them are in cloud cuckoo land because the rest of the country will be enraged if they shut down services. So the government has a difficult few months ahead.

The other part of the budget which caused the most grief was the cut in welfare. Again, one can have sympathy with those at the sharp end. But the exaggeration of the size and effect of the cuts by the usual lefty commentators was hard to take.

The fact is that Ireland has a generous and extensive social welfare system. The cuts are relatively modest and are only a little ahead of the fall in the cost of living.

Let's look at some examples. The payment to those out of work (what Americans call welfare, we used to call the dole and now call jobseekers allowance) was $297 and is now $285 a week. That's a cut of $12, or about 4% -- hardly enough to warrant the cries of outrage and despair that were heard last week.

There were also cuts in child benefit which is paid for every child in the country and is not taxed or means tested. The payment was cut by $23 a month (down from $241 to $218 for the first child).

A family with three children was getting $778 a month and will now get $708. Again, difficult for some families but manageable for most. But the reaction from some lefty commentators was off the scale.

The media here lapped it up, featuring examples of single mothers with four or five children and calculating how much they will lose. Of course no one dares ask politically incorrect questions like why a single mum has four or five kids or where the father(s) are, and why they are not paying maintenance.

The fact is that a single mum with no job and four kids will (even after this budget) be getting a one parent family payment of 196 euros a week, plus child benefit of $999 a month and will also probably be getting other payments like rent allowance (typically around $1,308 a month), fuel allowance (to pay for heating in winter), back to school allowance (for clothes and books for the kids at the start of the school year) plus other payments as well if she can show she needs them. It would be usual for a family like this to be getting $3,634 - $4,361 a month in state handouts.

No one is saying it should not be like this, but some of the reaction to the cuts in welfare in the Budget -- averaging 4% -- were so hysterical that you would think we had no welfare system left at all.

That said, there are some sections of the public (like those who care full time for a disabled relative and get a carer's allowance) where even a cut of 4% is very hard. It would have been better to tax the child benefit going to well off people than do that, but there are complex administrative and legal reasons why this is difficult to do in the short term.

Another cut that attracted a lot of comment was the change in payments for the young jobless. Those aged 18 and 19 get $150 a week. Those aged 20 and 21 used to get $296 a week, but that has now been chopped to the same $150 a week, unless they take part in retraining schemes run by the state.

It has been pointed out that there is a long waiting list for some of these training schemes, and that the cut is forcing these young adults back to live with their parents or else into emigration.

There is some truth in this. But it is also true that some of the young adults in question were making little attempt either to get retrained or to find a job, either in Ireland or abroad. They were choosing not to take low paid jobs (the kind now being filled by foreigners) because they preferred to live on their $296 a week handout.

It is important for the state not to encourage this mindset, which can all too easily translate into a long-term attitude. All through the boom there were thousands of long term unemployed here.

We could afford it then. We can't afford it now.

A wider argument about the budget was that in general it hit those on low incomes and reduced benefits to those with no incomes instead of taking much more from the high earners. But marginal taxes for middle and high earners here are already over 50%, and pushing them much higher will drive key people out.

Putting very high taxes on a few people was never going to solve our problem. Action had to be taken on the spending side and that meant cuts. And by spreading the cuts across all benefits, it was possible to keep the reduction to an average 4%.

In a country where welfare benefits only ever went one way -- up -- it has been a shock. But it's not nearly as bad as you might think reading the headlines here.

Cowen's leadership put to the test as Irish 'dead cat' bounces

October 2, 2009, 11:41 AM

You may be familiar with the term "dead cat bounce," beloved of stock market traders. They use it to describe the phenomenon of a share price that falls to the floor, then recovers somewhat for a while, before falling back to the floor again and staying there.

It's a dead cat bounce. Like when you throw a dead cat out a window to the street far below. It bounces when it hits the ground. But that doesn't mean it's alive again.

Well, there's a very dead cat in the air in Ireland at the moment. And it's fostering a feeling of well being and business-as-usual.

It's giving people the misplaced hope that maybe this crisis is not so bad after all, that we will be able to get through it without really feeling any pain.

In the last week or two the leaders of the Irish banks have been making positive statements about their future, following a modest recovery in bank shares. This only happened because the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) is about to take their mountain of bad debts away at a reasonable price.

The truth is that without NAMA our banks are bust. And even with NAMA, the government is still going to have to dig deep into taxpayers' pockets to recapitalize them again, after recapitalizing them the first time just months ago.

And it's not just the bankers who are pushing the positive spin. The politicians are at it as well, although at least they have an excuse because they have to get the Lisbon referendum passed this Friday.

All the spin in the world won't alter the truth, however. The truth is we face an enormous economic problem, and the way out of the mess involves severe and unavoidable pain for everyone.

The state is spending over €60 billion a year but only getting in €40 billion in revenue. The collapse of our property bubble and the consequent deep recession in the economy has shrunk tax revenue -- but the state is still spending like it did during the boom.

That's because cutting state services is very difficult. But it simply can't go on.

So new taxes or savage cuts in state spending are necessary to stop the country going bust like the banks. Taxes went up in the last budget and in the emergency budget.

A few weeks ago the politicians were saying that next time the emphasis would have to be on cuts. They even put a figure on it -- *€4 billion to be cut in the year ahead, and the same again the year after and a few billion in the years after that.

That level of cuts is hard to comprehend. It's impossible to do without impacting very heavily on the state services that everyone now takes for granted -- schools, hospitals, welfare, transport and so on.

And above all, it will have painful consequences for state workers and their high levels of pay and pensions which now account for over a third of all state spending.

To help identify where the cuts are to be made, the government set up Bord Snip and its report was made a couple of months ago. Its chairman Colm McCarthy revealed that we were now borrowing €400 million a week to maintain the day to day running of the state and maintain services. He identified a list of cuts that could be made across all areas of state spending.

Shortly after that the Taxation Commission reported on what we needed to do to reform our tax system. Over recent years our tax system has become complex and cumbersome, with exceptions and exclusions that make it inefficient and let too many rich people off the hook.

We badly need a simpler and fairer system. And we also need a system that will bring in more revenue.

The independent Commission on Taxation has been working away on this for some years, and it is fortuitous that its report came when it did recently. One of the main proposals was for a property tax, something which any sane person knows we should have, even if no one wants to pay it.

The government reacted to both these reports in somber tones, saying it was going to be tough but there was no alternative. The government is still saying that €4 billion has to be cut in the next budget, a figure agreed with the European Union which is supporting us through this crisis.

But in the past week or two the mood music coming from Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen and individual ministers has changed key. It's now more upbeat.

It started with Cowen saying that he was looking at the changes recommended in the Taxation Commission report as a long term project. Something to be achieved over a number of years, he said.

And it's the same with the McCarthy report on the cutbacks in spending. Several ministers have said they oppose some of the proposed cuts, and the Tanaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) Mary Coughlan even said that there are many things wrong with the Bord Snip proposals.

So little by little, the momentum for change that had built up has dissipated. The sense of urgency about making cuts to start us on the long road to balancing the state's books has gone. There is a lot of talk, but no action.

It's months since the McCarthy report appeared and NOTHING has been done. And meanwhile, with every week that passes, we're another €400 million in the red.

The national mood has not been helped by the culture that pervades at senior levels in politics, the civil service and state run organizations here. It's a culture of high salaries and lavish expenses.

The line “Because We're Worth It” could have been invented for these guys. Their attitude is that nothing but the best is good enough for Irish officials, and because it's taxpayers' money it's a bottomless pit. So they spend and spend.

There has been a huge dispute in the past couple of weeks over Rody Molloy, the former head of the national training organization FAS, and the lavish expenses regime he presided over in a body that is supposed to be helping unemployed people get jobs. The shocking details are on Irish media Web sites.

Also there are the details of the scandalous spending of the present chairman of the Dail (Parliament) when he was a minister. Some of the limo and five-star hotel stuff he got up to is unbelievable.

But the truth is that these two were by no means alone. During the boom delusions of grandeur were common among senior people on the state payroll.

And many of them still have not changed their behavior. The dead cat bounce atmosphere at the moment is encouraging them to continue their lavish spending.

Meanwhile, the same attitude prevails at lower levels in the state sector. The powerful state sector unions are preparing to fight any attempt to cut the pay levels and pensions of their members.

Their pay is now 25 percent higher than the average private worker, the guy whose taxes pays them in the first place. And their state-guaranteed, index-linked pensions are the envy of private workers, many of whom have seen their pensions wiped out by the stock market crash.

Yet the state workers are unwilling to share the pain. What they have, they intend to hold.

They are trying to claim that the recent pension levy taken out of their earnings was a pay cut. It wasn't. It was simply an attempt to get them to pay a fraction of the real cost of their pensions, which would cost millions if a private sector worker wanted to buy a similar pension on the open market.

State workers in Ireland at all levels earn far more than their counterparts in Britain, for example, and no one knows why. Certainly no one would claim that services here are better than in the U.K.

We drifted into this situation in the good times when the national pay deals gave huge increases to everyone. That is now being reversed in private industry and private services here, where workers are taking deep pay cuts to keep their jobs.

But there is no sign of any give among the state workers. This is why we have one of the highest cost economies in Europe, and as a result are losing jobs so fast it makes your head spin.

Power plant workers are paid so much that electricity costs here are way above the European average, for example. Why? Because they have an effective state monopoly.

We have to change all this for two reasons. First, if we don't change, Ireland will go bust and the IMF will be in here on a slash mission to balance the books.

And second, if we don't change, private sector workers will continue to lose jobs and the pot of revenue to pay for state services will be even smaller.

It's a huge test of leadership for Cowen. It appeared that he was up for the challenge a couple of months ago.

But now all the signals indicate a failure of will, a lack of courage. As soon as Lisbon is out of the way on Friday he needs to take action. He should have done it after the Bord Snip report was released a couple of months back.

There is no reason to wait for the budget. Every day that passes is another day lost, gazing at the dead cat floating in mid-air.

Dentists and state workers clean up in Ireland as rest of us suffer economic crisis

October 15, 2009, 8:52 AM

Last week I brought my two 16-year-old sons (twins) for their six monthly dental check-up. Amazingly, in view of all the tooth destroying garbage they eat, no fillings were necessary.

So apart from the careful visual check which took three or four minutes each, they had their teeth thoroughly cleaned with that high speed gizmo that dentists use which took another five or six minutes each, and they were done. Relief all round.

Total time in the chair was about 10 minutes each. The cost? €80. And that's €80 each, not for the two of them.

At that rate (even allowing for coffee breaks) our Dublin dentist is on well over €300 an hour or €2,000 a day, or €10,000 ($14,000) a week.

On the way out I tried to pay the receptionist with a credit card. Sorry, cash or check only, I was told, and I got the distinct impression that cash was much preferred. The helpful receptionist even told me where the nearest ATM was!

Now you may think this story is mildly shocking, but in fact there is nothing remarkable about an experience like this in Dublin. Our dentist is no different to all the other members of the elite here, the professionals (doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc.), the senior civil servants, the managers of state organizations, the executives in private business and so on.

They all exist in a sort of parallel Ireland, where no bust has happened and they can go on charging the same level of fees, salaries and expenses they did at the height of the boom.

This elite layer at the top of Irish society used to include architects and construction engineers and even tradesmen like plumbers and carpenters, all of whom used to charge crazy fees during the boom.

The property crash has put a stop to that group, of course, but the rest of the elite here are still behaving like the Celtic Tiger is still roaring. A recent survey showed that most doctors, dentists and lawyers have not dropped their fees in spite of endless government warnings that we all need to cut back to make Ireland competitive again.

This attitude is most evident in the state sector. In private industry, executives are sharing the pain with their ordinary workers, although a 10 percent pay cut is more bearable if you're earning €500,000 instead of €50,000!

But in the state sector, even though the state finances are in crisis because tax revenue has fallen through the floor, the change in pay (and attitude) is very slow in coming. The limo on call, plush hotel, good restaurants and lavish expenses are still the expectation of the elite who never worried before where the state money came from, and still don't.

This attitude has caused absolute fury among ordinary people here following several weeks of reports in the media about the way tax money is wasted by the state-paid elite.

This week we are seeing the first victim of the outrage. The ceann comhairle (speaker) of the Dail (Parliament), John "Limo" O'Donoghue, is being forced to resign because of his wild spending while on state business.

But it's not just him. Week after week, the media have been digging up unbelievable examples of splurging in the state sector.

Ironically, some of the worst examples have been among the senior people in FAS, the state organization set up to help retrain the unemployed. But politicians and senior civil servants in all areas (and a few top union officials as well) have been guilty of throwing around state money.

In the days when the economy was booming no one noticed this. But now that the bust has happened and ordinary people are struggling, the ongoing revelations about the higher ups in the state sector behaving like Arab princes have appalled every taxpayer here.

One example that emerged in the past few days shows how deeply rooted the problem is. We all expect overspending among the cowboys in Fianna Fail, but this one concerned Fianna Fail’s coalition partners the Green Party, which regards itself as morally superior to everyone else and believes wasting anything, including state money, is unacceptable.

The leader of the Greens, John Gormley, attended a conference in Wales recently and decided to reduce his carbon footprint by taking the ferry from Dublin to Holyhead in Wales before traveling on to the conference at the other end of Wales by car. So Gormley got the ferry and, because he is a government minister, the Irish Embassy in London organized a car to met him in Holyhead.

All of which sounds fine, except that the car was a chauffeur-driven limo that was hired in London and driven the 300 miles to Holyhead to meet the minister. The driver took Gormley to the conference and, two days later, back to Holyhead.

The limo trip cost the Irish taxpayer €2,200, and all those car miles in a big limo probably produced a lot of those carbon emissions that the Greens want us all to reduce.

When this emerged last week there were red faces all round. Gormley said he knew nothing about the travel arrangements. The booking was made by the Irish Embassy in London.

But why was a small car not hired in Holyhead, a busy ferry port? Why all those wasted miles for a big limo? Why?

Because the state-paid minion in the London Embassy who organized this could not be bothered trying to save money. He (or she) hired the limo from the usual place because it was the simplest thing to do, and no one cares about the cost anyway. It's state money and the state is a bottomless pit, right?

Like with my dentist there is nothing unusual in this story, because so many people on the state payroll here have been doing the same thing, lashing money around like we were as rich as Germany instead of a poor little island hanging off the edge of Europe. This culture of entitlement, of always ordering the best and never considering the cost, has become engrained among the elite here.

It was an embarrassing story for the Greens and it had particular relevance over the past few days because the Greens were holding a special conference last weekend to see if they would continue in government with Fianna Fail.

The Greens have just a few Dail deputies, but they hold the balance of power. The next election is not until 2012, and so much has changed since Bertie Ahern brought them into the coalition that they felt they needed a renewed mandate from their members.

So at the end of last week they negotiated a changed program for government with Fianna Fail, and the Green party members met at the weekend to approve that and the NAMA plan to rescue the Irish banks.

Leaving aside the absurdity of a few hundred members of the brown rice brigade deciding the future of the country, the "new program" they were voting on was naive and contradictory to the point of being dangerous. Needless to say they accepted it, because like Fianna Fail they know if there was an election now they would be annihilated.

The program actually contained very little of real substance. There are to be water charges at some point, some kind of carbon tax and some kind of limits on tax loopholes for the wealthy among other things. It's finger in the dyke stuff, vague and hopelessly inadequate in terms of the huge budgetary problems the country faces.

Even worse was the way the program avoided the core problem facing us -- the need to bridge the huge gap between state spending and tax revenue that has opened up here after the property collapse. We're spending over €55 billion and getting around €32 billion in tax, and the figures keep getting worse.

The shortfall has to be borrowed and that cannot continue or we really will go bust. And there are no easy answers.

One-third of all state spending goes on welfare payments and another one-third on pay for state workers, so there has to be major cuts in those areas if we are to start getting the budget back in line.

The money to keep us going in the meantime is coming from the European Central Bank, and we have agreed with the European Union to a program of cuts over the next three or four years - this year we have to cut a whopping €4 billion from state spending.

What did the Greens have to say about this? Nothing.

What did they have to say about the real hot potato, the necessity to cut state sector pay and pensions, which are very high by British and European standards? Nothing.

They did agree that the government must reduce the cost of the state services, but at the same time they promised to employ more, not fewer, state workers. Because they think education is important (don't we all) they promised to hire 500 extra school teachers and to dump the plan Fianna Fail was working on to reintroduce university fees.

They did this without making any proposals on teacher pay, even though the average teacher here earns 30 percent more than in Britain, and university staff in Ireland are among the highest paid in Europe.

How are the Greens going to plug the gap in the state finances? "We will stabilize the public finances through a combination of taxation and expenditure savings," they say. Which tells us nothing.

So at the very time when real leadership is needed here to get the population to face up to the tough choices ahead, the Greens give us waffle. They have no detailed proposals about the deep cuts we need to make to restore our competitiveness and protect jobs in the real - not state - economy.

At the very time when we need to wake up to reality and cut back on state spending before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) comes in, the Greens carry on as before. I wonder is our dentist a party member?

Ireland is a country with delusions of grandeur

October 21, 2009, 3:14 PM

We went to see a Manchester United match at Old Trafford a couple of weeks ago. On the short flight over I was trying to explain to my teenage son why the Irish government is about to make huge cutbacks in state spending.

It wasn't that I had a captive audience and was doing some forced education. He actually asked me, prompted by a headline in the paper he was reading saying that state support for his school is going to be reduced.

Why are things so bad in Ireland? I struggled to explain.

But as we came in over the edge of the city I told him to look down. Manchester has roughly the same population as Ireland, I said. But they don't have to pay for a parliament, a huge civil service, an army, a diplomatic service and all the rest of it.

We're only the size of a city, but we have the expenses of a country. It's okay for us when the economy is doing well. But when the economy is depressed, there's not enough money to pay for everything.

I see, he said. And then switched the conversation to more interesting things like how "we" were going to kill Sunderland (it ended in a draw after a poor Man U performance).

I thought about my explanation as we came in to land and realized that although it was simplistic, it really was the essence of the problem we face. We are a country with delusions of grandeur, a country with a bloated state sector in which people get salaries that match those paid to their counterparts in countries 10 times our size. We can't afford it any longer and it has to stop.

Last week in this column, I was talking about the expenses scandal that brought down John O’Donoghue the speaker of the Dail (Parliament). But overspending by individuals is not the main problem. There are a host of state and semi-state organizations in Ireland with high paid executives that we can no longer afford.

One of the worst is Fas, the national training authority, which is supposed to retrain and up-skill unemployed people but has been wasting huge amounts of taxpayers money.

The latest story to emerge about Fas is another glimpse into the way senior executives in these state bodies feed off the taxpayer. This one revealed that a former director-general of Fas was given a pension equivalent to 40 years of service even though he’d worked only 17 years in the public sector.

He also got a large golden handshake when he moved from Fas to become chairman of CIE, the state transport company, where he is now paid €239,000 a year. CIE lost €310 million last year.

It's not just the inflated salaries, golden handshakes and pensions we have to deal with. It's the sheer number of state organizations and quangos that mushroomed in the boom years, all still soaking up lakes of public funding.

The change needs to start at the top. An example has to be set if the ordinary workers on the state payroll, like teachers, nurses and police, are to accept further pay cuts.

So this weekend, stories were floated from government sources predicting that the December budget would introduce pay cuts of 20% to 30% for ministers. Leading by example is the strategy.

Enda Kenny, the leader of the main opposition party, went a step further last weekend and suggested that the upper chamber of the Irish Parliament, the Seanad, should be abolished. It's hugely expensive and largely irrelevant and it would set the kind of example we need.

Abolishing it would be the sort of wake-up call the country needs to focus everyone's attention on just how serious situation we face is. While they're at it, they should also abolish the system whereby former ministers and taoiseachs (prime ministers, like Bertie Ahern) who are still in the Dail get an immediate ministerial pension as well as their Dail salary.

Adding to the chorus of warnings last week was one from the Minister for Health Mary Harney, who openly predicted that if we did not take drastic action the International Monetary Fund would have to come in here to sort out the mess and stop our economy collapsing altogether. For a senior minister to say this kind of thing is unprecedented and shows that we now really are approaching crunch point.

The crunch will come early in December in the budget for the coming year. Already it's being talked about as the toughest ever, as we struggle to cut down the €500 million a week we are now borrowing to keep day to day services going.

We are committed to reducing the budget deficit in this December's budget by €4 billion, and Taoiseach Brian Cowen and Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan have said several times that most of that will be achieved by cuts in spending rather than new taxes.

And it's not just this December's budget for the coming year. There will have to be cuts on a similar scale in the following three years if we are to live up to the promise to get the deficit back to the level that is acceptable for members of the European Union by 2013/2014.

This level is EU policy agreed by all the member nations, and failure to meet it would put in danger our ongoing funding from the European Central Bank that is now loaning us the money to keep going.

As the fat in state spending is cut away, it will get progressively more difficult in the coming years to find more things to cut each year. So although people here don't realize it yet, the truth is that we are faced not just with one very tough year but with four or five years when services and the standard of living in Ireland are going to fall by extremely painful amounts.

Some commentators here are desperately looking for a way out. But there is no alternative.

The union leaders argue that further pay cuts will drive down demand here and make our recession even deeper. That is true up to a point.

But exports are the life blood of the Irish economy, and our costs are way out of line with our competitors, mainly due to wages that soared here during the boom. Cutting pay here is essential to making us competitive on the international market again.

The unions also argue that pay rates are only part of the reason for the high cost of doing business here, citing other costs like power and transport. But if you look at electricity prices here, for example, they are way out of line with the rest of Europe, largely because the staff in the semi-state organization that supplies most electricity are paid huge salaries (workers in some power plants here are getting over €120,000 euro a year).

The other reason we are in such trouble is our version of the China syndrome. Look around you in Ireland these days and almost everything you see comes from somewhere else, very often China.

Nothing is made here anymore, because we can't compete. Our manufacturing industry has been wiped out by cheaper countries. Our supposed edge in the so-called knowledge economy has been wiped out by equally smart but much cheaper young information technology workers in places like Eastern Europe, India and, again, China.

Even more depressing is a visit to a supermarket here. All the usual household items are made outside Ireland.

But increasingly, a lot of what we eat comes from somewhere else as well. And again, the reason comes back to cost, and that comes back to the high wages which are the main legacy of the boom here, with very little in the way of productivity or ingenuity to back them up.

It's a gloomy picture. Of course, one could say the same about the U.S., China's biggest customer by far and also one of its biggest lenders.

The Chinese hold close to $1,000 billion in U.S. government bonds, so they have to keep lending to the U.S. because if America and the dollar collapses all that paper will be worthless and their biggest market will be gone. It's Catch 22, Chinese style.

The difference for Ireland is that no one would care if we went bust. So we can't go on borrowing like the U.S. is doing.

If we can get through this, at least we will still own Ireland. The way the U.S. economy and U.S. borrowing is going, the Chinese will own America.

Zai jian y'all.

Does Irish government support driving, or drinking?

October 28, 2009, 1:54 PM

The former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, talking about being in government and holding on to power, once famously remarked that "you get over the big issues, it's the little things that trip you up."

It was a little thing that tripped him up. And it was a little thing that just over a week ago threatened the future of the government here.

It wasn't the bitter division in the country on what to do about our massive budget deficit, with the unions now planning national strikes if the government goes ahead with the planned cutbacks. Having subjected the readers of this column to lessons in national economics for weeks now, we're going to leave discussion of that piece of insanity for another day.

This column is going to be an economics free zone this week. So if it wasn't the crisis in the Irish economy, what was the threat to the government last week?

It was the little matter of drink. Or drinking and driving, to be precise.

The Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey announced to the Fianna Fail party just over a week ago that he was going to change the law to reduce the blood alcohol limit for drivers from 80 mgs to 50 mgs, which would put most people over the limit after just one drink. The proposal was greeted with outrage at a meeting of the Fianna Fail parliamentary party, with up to 25 Fianna Fail backbenchers angrily arguing against the move at the meeting in the Dail (Parliament).

They had put up with the legislation to save the banks which is going to cost taxpayers billions. They had defended the proposed cuts in state spending among their voters. They had swallowed a lot of bitter but necessary economic medicine in the past year.

But this was a step too far. This was so stupid, so ridiculous, so unnecessary at a time when people are putting up with so much grief, they shouted. They threatened to rebel on the vote in the Dail, to bring the government down if necessary.

And Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen and his government, who now have a fragile majority, decided to find a way out. Having been through so much in the past year and with so many major decisions of national importance ahead, there was no way Cowen was going to let a "little thing" like drink put his government in jeopardy.

So, leaving his high-minded minister for transport looking red-faced, he told the next Dail meeting that, while everyone was in favor of measures to reduce road deaths, there was a need for coordination with Northern Ireland, where the limit is still 80 mgs. The whole thing would have to be planned.

Or in other words, you can expect no change in the law here any time soon, and certainly not for the next year or more. So that took care of that "little thing."

Predictably, of course, the politically correct lobby here went crazy. There were outraged editorials in the papers decrying the government's weakness.

There were figures from "scientific" studies showing that lowering the blood alcohol level further would definitely save lives. There were accusations that it was the backwoods deputies from the rural areas who had sunk this most desirable change.

What there was not to be found anywhere in the media was a voice to stick up for the backwoodsmen, to say that Cowen (a bogman known to enjoy a pint) might be right.

Well, here's one bogtrotter who's not afraid to speak out. In the vast majority of cases, it's not alcohol that kills people on the roads, it's speed.

The idea that someone is not fit to drive after one drink -- or even two drinks -- is nonsense, as long as that person drives slowly and carefully. But, of course, saying that is heresy to the politically correct brigade, for whom the world is black and white.

They will cite you endless studies and statistics showing that alcohol impairs judgment of distance, vision, coordination, reaction time, spatial awareness, a sense of responsibility and so on. And they are correct. It does.

But the question is, by how much? In the black and white world of the politically correct, even asking the question is offensive.

But the fact is that low levels of alcohol have low levels of effect on judgment. As long as you are careful, you concentrate, and you do not drive fast, most adults can drive perfectly safely after one -- or even two -- drinks.

I know many people in the part of the bog I come from in the middle of Ireland who do exactly that. They are the older farmers who live out in the country a few miles from their local village pub, often their only social contact in the week besides the church on Sunday.

They used to come in to the pub one or two nights a week, have a pint or two and a cigarette or two, and then drive home very carefully at 30 mph. Because they had a pint or two, they drove with extra care and caution, and very few of them had accidents.

But that was before we all went mad with political correctness and health fascism. Now the old guys are too afraid to come out in case they are caught driving after a couple of pints and are put off the road. And of course they can't smoke in a pub.

So they stay at home, isolated, their social life ruined ... and the small country pubs all over Ireland are closing up for good as a way of life dies. You could not make this stuff up.

The do-gooders and the health police have made responsible people all over Ireland feel guilty. They have made the lives of many people, particularly older people in rural areas, miserable.

So I'm glad that at least 20 Fianna Fail backbenchers from the country had the nerve to stand up to the minister last week and say enough!

Dempsey tried to assuage the anger by proposing that motorists who are caught with between 50 mgs and 80 mgs of alcohol in their blood would get six penalty points and a ****200 fine rather than an automatic driving ban. But the rebels were not having it.

There was a principle involved. They wanted the already strict limit to be retained, and so far they have got their way.

It was small victory for commonsense, but worthwhile. Yet you would not think it reading the papers the day after Cowen put the issue on hold.

The scathing editorial in one paper was typical: "The about-turn by the taoiseach on the plan to lower the drink-driving limit is only the latest in a series of capitulations to political pressure, each one of which has sapped public confidence and diminished the government's moral authority. Because it would have saved lives, the long fingering of the new road safety measure is probably the most shameful surrender to date."

It got worse: "A handful of Fianna Fail backbench deputies oppose the legislation on the plea that it would contribute to rural isolation. That is, frankly, not much of an argument.

“Rural isolation is a complex question, with roots that go back generations. One wonders how many uneasy backbenchers have ever given it any serious thought. But in any case, a government should act on any issue according to its own conception of the greater good."

We can say one thing for certain. Whoever wrote that superior garbage has not given it serious thought, in spite of the pompous tone.

Rural isolation and the death of country pubs are very real problems. The greater good has to include the interests of people who live in rural areas where there is no late night public transport, and where the car is the only way of getting home from the pub.

The underlying presumptions in most of the "scientific" studies I have seen are also open to question, especially as alcohol limits have got down to very low levels.

How many of these studies include information on the speed of the vehicle when the accident happened?

Or how much care was being taken by the driver? Or what condition the vehicle was in? Or the age of the driver? Or how frequently the speed cops were to be seen in the area?

The answer is none. The studies only consider alcohol levels, ignoring the fact that the majority of fatal accidents here are caused by young men driving much too fast.

Some have not drunk at all. Some don't just have one or two drinks, they have a bellyful. And maybe drugs as well.

Of course it's not only the boy racers who are the problem. There are older adults who drink way too much and then drive. And they deserve no sympathy.

Bringing the alcohol blood level limit down to tiny levels makes no difference to people like this and other real offenders who drink too much and then drive carelessly. But it can destroy the social life of law-abiding, moderate people who would rather die than do harm to anyone else.

If you see the world in black and white, of course, none of this matters. The simplistic solution is the correct one, not matter what damage it causes to some people's lives.

Let's look at the Irish statistics. The 100 mgs per 100 ml limit came into law in 1978. That year, 628 people were killed on Irish roads. In 1979, the number dropped to 614.

The 80 mgs per 100 mls limit was enacted in December 1994. In 1995, 436 people were killed. But in 1994, when the limit was still 100 mgs, only 404 people were killed.

So the statistics clearly don't tell us everything. Although in general deaths go down as alcohol limits are lowered, there are variations.

And other factors also contribute to the decline, like better roads, better vehicles, more speed cops, seat belt enforcement and greater awareness of the need for care when driving after a drink or two.

The Irish statistics also show that in one of four fatal accidents the driver had consumed alcohol. So even if alcohol was the only factor that caused accidents, limiting it to zero will still not stop 75% of fatal accidents. It's not the magic formula you would think from the concentration by the media on the drink driving issue.

We should be concentrating on the other factors that cause road deaths -- like high speed -- rather than reducing the already low blood alcohol limit even further and causing a lot of country people a lot of unnecessary misery.

Knock, Knock, who's there?

November 4, 2009, 2:04 PM

There were lots of knock, knock jokes here this week. Or even Knock, knock jokes.

Knock, knock, who's there? It's Virgin.

Virgin who? Vergin' on the ridiculous.

And it was indeed verging on the ridiculous here last weekend, as thousands of people again gathered in the little town of Knock in Co. Mayo fully expecting to see an apparition by the Virgin Mary.

The true believers among you will, of course, know that Knock is Ireland's answer to Lourdes or Fatima. It's where the Virgin Mary is supposed to have appeared to a small group of people 130 years ago at the gable end of the local church.

The Blessed Virgin was accompanied in the apparition in 1879 by two other figures, thought to be St. Joseph and John the Evangelist, although since they were all shimmering away in the twilight it was hard to be certain.

The vision continued for a few hours, and other local people who arrived claimed to see not only the three main figures, but also a few angels hovering above them and an altar beside them with a lamb on it (the lamb of God being Jesus).

The event was an international sensation and was even covered extensively in The New York Times. The local bishop at the time and the Catholic Church treated the claims of an apparition with caution, but over the years Knock acquired a degree of credibility and is now given some recognition by the Vatican.

Over recent decades it has developed into a major international pilgrimage site, the little church is now sidelined by a vast basilica with a processional square in front, and well over a million pilgrims a year come to visit. Which is great for business, especially in this remote area in the west of Ireland.

There have been various reported sightings and happenings over the years, but nothing significant and certainly nothing to match the original event. Even so, the fame of this Marian Shrine has spread around the world.

And it was given a huge boost in 1979, the centenary of the apparition, when Pope John Paul II visited the shrine during his trip to Ireland.

The real test for a shrine like Lourdes is miracles, of course, and on that score Knock has not done very well, if at all. The New York Times reported on claimed miracles after the original apparition. But the main miracle is more recent.

It's Knock Airport which the famous Monsignor Horan, the priest who built the basilica, created a few miles away on a boggy hill in the middle of nowhere in an area plagued by mist and fog. Everyone thought he was mad when he came up with his plans for Knock International Airport but it worked and it's still successful, mainly because of its popularity with west of Ireland emigrants who live in Britain and don't want to go through Dublin Airport on visits home.

The shrine at Knock (and the miraculous airport) is busy throughout the summer but usually is quiet at this time of year. However, the outbreak of religious mania there over the past few weeks has been a late season bonanza for the local shops, pubs and B&Bs. The place has been packed, with an estimated 15,000 people there last weekend.

If you were cynical you might think that the sudden surge of interest has been whipped up by the local business people. But mass devotion (or hysteria) on this scale is not so easily contrived or explained. There is something much more fundamental going on.

This latest outpouring of religious fervor (or madness) really began a few weeks back when a clairvoyant and faith healer from Dublin called Joe Coleman made a prediction that the Virgin Mary would appear above the shrine at Knock on October 11. The prediction was repeated on an afternoon show on RTE television and around 10,000 people turned up at Knock to see what would happen. Many of them subsequently claimed to have seen the sun dancing and faces appearing in the sky.

By last weekend, when according to Coleman the next event was due, up to 15,000 people were in Knock. At 3 p.m. on Saturday, the predicted time when things would happen, the basilica was crammed and a big crowd was in the square outside staring upwards at the heavens (or outer space, depending on your point of view). Coleman and his fellow spiritualist and visionary Keith Henderson were inside kneeling before the altar, apparently transfixed by what they were seeing.

According to reports, both were focused "on a point on, or beyond, the altar. Mr. Coleman's face betrayed little emotion, but Mr. Henderson wore a large smile for much of the event."

Whatever they were seeing was not visible to the rest of the crowd, who prayed and sang hymns. Outside, there were cries of people who claimed to be seeing things in the sky and waves of applause and prayers moved through the crowd.

People leaving the basilica were saying that Coleman and Henderson had indeed seen the Virgin Mary who had passed on "a message." The message (Don't put your money in Irish banks? Bring Andy Reid back into the Irish soccer squad?) was not divulged.

But Coleman predicted that there would be another, even better, apparition at Knock on December 8. He has also claimed that these Knock appearances by Our Lady were preceded by another apparition by her in September in a remote part of Donegal.

The local bishop and clergy in Knock are not happy about all this fanatical devotion, however. Bishop Neary, who had advised people to stay away, deplored the behavior as unhealthy and said it was bringing Knock into disrepute.

He pointed out that the apparition in 1879 had been neither sought nor expected, in contrast with these supposed apparitions which were being predicted and publicized in advance, leading to high levels of expectation among thousands of people. He could have said gullible, desperate people.

Meanwhile this headache for Bishop Neary is not going to go away any time soon. Coleman, who left Knock on Saturday afternoon claiming he had witnessed an apparition and had received communication from the Virgin Mary, has predicted that a third apparition on December 8 will be even more significant. And an even bigger crowd is expected.

You could dismiss all this as mass hysteria, although a lot of the people claiming to have seen the sun dancing in the sky over Knock last Saturday seem perfectly sane.

There may be a simpler explanation, of course. Coleman had predicted that the Virgin would appear "in the sky over Knock,” so the vast crowd was looking upwards.

And if you look at the sun for long enough it will indeed dance and when you look away you will indeed see shapes, as your eyes recover from the brightness. That and the waves of emotion and religious fervor sweeping through the crowd probably explains a lot.

Although I could be completely wrong and I may burn in Hell for daring to write Godless stuff like this. But for me (and all the other Dublin sophisticates) the answer is clear.

It cannot be an accident that this visionary, fundamentalist behavior is happening at a time of great uncertainty and unhappiness here when the country is grappling with its biggest economic crisis ever. (Maybe the Virgin's message on Saturday was "NAMA is not the answer!") 



You may remember that the last time we had an outbreak of mass religious hysteria here was back in the mid-eighties when we had the moving statue phenomenon. People all over the country were standing before small Marian shrines for hours and seeing statues moving and weeping.

The mid-eighties, you will remember, was a time when we had a serious economic downturn in Ireland and there was mass emigration, which probably included some people now reading this page. And if you go back to the original apparition at Knock in 1879, that happened at a time of great upheaval and stress in Ireland. It was not long after the last pockets of famine in the west, and it was during the agitation of the Land War.

In the Knock area these tensions had been particularly high at the time of the apparition.

Coincidence? I don't think so.

All together now ... Faith of our fathers, Holy Faith, we will be true to thee 'til death ...

Dublin protest: The delusional march to nowhere

November 11, 2009, 11:40 AM

Last Friday, November 6, up to 70,000 workers in Ireland took to the streets in cities and major towns around the country in a mass protest against the cutbacks the government says must be made in state spending.

This great outpouring of frustration and anger united workers of all kinds, both those on the state payroll and those in private industry. It was a national, unified protest against government policy.

At least that's what the unions, who supplied the figures to the media, would like us all to believe.

The reality, however, is a bit more complicated. Let's start with the size of the protest marches.

The estimate from the Gardai (police) who monitored the march in Dublin was that 5,000 or 6,000 people took part, a lot less than the union estimate of 15,000. Presumably there was the same level of exaggeration about the size of the protests elsewhere. A national figure of 30,000 might be more accurate and is much less impressive.

But the numbers involved are less important than the other part of the union claim, that the marches had been supported by both state workers and private industry workers. A reporter on RTE Radio I heard interviewing people at the Dublin march said he had spent an hour or two at the protest, and had not been able to find a single person who was not on the state payroll.

The truth is that the protest got almost no support from private industry workers, presumably because they were too worried about endangering their jobs to take time off to go marching. The predominant mood among private industry workers -- those in the real economy in which businesses either make a profit or go under -- was that it was more important to stay at work and avoid any damage to the company they worked for.

This divide has become wider and more bitter here in the past few weeks. In private industry jobs are being lost all the time, workers have had to accept steep wage cuts and most guaranteed pensions have been discontinued.

These private industry workers feel that state workers, who are among the best paid in Europe and have generous guaranteed pensions, should take the pay cuts that are coming and stop whinging.

There is also the fact that four out of five workers in the state sector are in a union, but in private industry the number in unions has fallen dramatically. In the private sector only one in five workers now are unionized.

What that means is that the unions here now are mainly the voice of state paid workers and are fighting to preserve the privileged position these workers have, because that's where the union dues come from.

The unions in the state sector were very successful during the boom years in pushing up pay and conditions for state workers. And that was fine, as long as the taxes from the private sector workers which paid for everything kept rolling in.

The problem now is that the well has dried up. But state workers don't want to accept cuts deep enough to balance the government's books.

That's why 30,000 state paid workers were on the march in Ireland last Friday, or even 70,000 if you accept the union figure. But as one newspaper here pointed out, it wasn't the figure of 70,000 that was important. It was the figure of €70 ($104.8) million.

That was the only thing that had changed last Friday night. The country was €70 ($104.8) million deeper in debt because that's what the state has to borrow every day now to pay for state services and wages.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand our problem. The cost of state services and pay for state workers went up like a rocket during the boom here. Now that we're deep in recession -- and it's much worse here than in other European countries -- we can't pay the bill.

The gap between state spending and tax revenue is now a massive €26 ($38.9) billion. We are spending €58 ($86.8) billion this year, but tax revenue is down to €32 ($47.9) billion.

With a budget gap that big, the country would be bust in a few years because the international banks would stop lending to us. In fact we would be bust already except that the European Central Bank (ECB) is propping us up. To get ECB support, the government had to agree with Europe that we would close the budget deficit by around €4 ($5.99)billion a year in each of the next three or four years.

The government has already made it clear that raising taxes even more is not an option if we want to avoid crippling the economy even further. Taxes have been raised in the last year or two.

Now the concentration has to be on cuts in state spending. The cutback axe is now in the air and it will come swinging down on December 9, when the budget for the coming year is introduced.

And that is why the state workers were marching on Friday. They know they face severe cutbacks next month and, supported by their unions, they are trying to avoid the inevitable.

But despite the pretense of solidarity between state and private workers, they have little sympathy from the rest of the workforce. Faced with worry and uncertainty on a daily basis, private sector workers feel increasingly envious of state workers and resentful towards them.

Private workers don't have the guaranteed jobs that state workers do. On average they are paid 20% less and they can't look forward to the guaranteed, index-linked generous pensions that state workers get.

One economist here recently calculated that if state workers had to fund their pensions in the open market like everyone else, it would cost them much more than a third of their total pay every month. At present, in spite of the additional 7% pension levy applied to them recently by the state, they pay only a small fraction of the real cost of their pensions.

That is the reason there is growing bitterness between state and private workers here. The state workers are very well paid, have protected jobs and fantastic pensions, yet they are complaining about having to pay more to help solve the budget crisis. Private workers resent that and, in spite of union propaganda to the contrary, that resentment is growing.

When the cutbacks are announced on December 9, the issue will come to a head. If the state workers -- the Gardai (police), teachers, nurses, civil servants and so on -- take to the streets and cause major disruption in normal life here, there could be ugly confrontation with angry private sector workers.

The government is clearly concerned about the possibility of a breakdown in state services (like welfare payments, for example) and public unrest as a result. Yet there is no alternative to the cutbacks that are necessary.

The government has to cut €4 ($5.99) billion from public spending in 2010, broken down into cuts of €1.3 ($1.94) billion in public sector pay, 1.3 billion in social welfare payments and half a billion or more from capital spending and the rest of services, including education, health and so on.

Because the state payroll and welfare payouts each account for a third of all state spending (two thirds between them) there is no way cuts can be avoided in these areas. So state workers are going to have to take the pain.

Union leaders are clinging to the belief that instead of the cuts being implemented over the next four years, they should be spread out over the next eight years. They also want much higher taxes (both income and wealth taxes) to help reduce the deficit. But there is not a single economist who supports this, and the ECB will not put up with such a delay.

The fact is that Ireland is a small, open economy which must be competitive in the world market if jobs here are to be saved. We can't borrow our way out of our trouble. And we can't put off making cutbacks because we are already at crisis point.

The unions say that making cutbacks on the proposed scale will be very deflationary at a time when the economy is already down. And that is probably true. But we have to go through the adjustment if we are to be competitive again, and the sooner we get it over the better.

It's going to be very tough. We not only have to cut €4 ($5.99) billion out of state spending this year, we have to do it again the year after, and the year after that -- and it will get harder and harder to do each time as the fat in the system vanishes. But there is no alternative.

Last Friday, state workers went marching. On Tuesday, November 24, they are threatening to do it again on a much bigger scale that could see schools and other state services across the country shut down for the day.

The trouble is, they're marching down the road to nowhere.

Ireland's schools log on to the future - slowly

November 20, 2009, 2:13 PM

There's nothing like a recession to concentrate the mind! One of my kids is at the stage in school where he has to make choices about the subjects he wants to do in the Leaving Cert, the exam that Irish kids do before they leave school and either go on to university or out into the world of work. Or maybe that should be the world of unemployment.

So although he's only 16, the choices are important. For example, a kid who wants to do medicine must take chemistry in the Leaving Cert and might want to do biology as well. To do engineering in college you must take higher level math.

Those options, of course, are for the very bright kids who will get top marks in the Leaving Cert. You need an almost perfect score to get into medical school here.

But even for kids who are aiming lower or don't really know what they want to do (like my son and most of his friends) the choice of subjects is still important. If they think they might want to do a business or economics degree in university they should really be choosing business and economics as a Leaving Cert subject, and perhaps accounting as well.

If they feel they might be heading towards a career in manufacturing or engineering they need to do a degree in science or engineering, which means they should be concentrating on subjects like physics and math in the Leaving.

During the boom it did not seem to matter what you did in school or even in university. There were jobs aplenty for graduates of all kinds.

Now we're deep in the worst recession we have ever seen and jobs are much harder to get, even for those with specialist qualifications.

So for a lot of parents in Ireland -- and for a lot of teenagers -- this recession has been a wake-up call. Suddenly everyone here is much more focused on what one needs to do in school and university to maximize the chances of getting a job.

Kids who a few years back would be talking dreamily about doing degrees in marine biology (not that there's anything wrong with that) are now talking about degrees in international trade or business.

The harsh world out there now has also made parents start asking a lot of questions about the emphasis of the Irish school system, which is still centered on the arts rather than on the sciences and the business world.

A lot of nonsense is talked about how brilliant the Irish education system is. The reality is different, with poorly equipped science labs and computers still a rarity.

The Leaving Cert subjects Irish teenagers can do in the exam include Latin (don't remind me), Greek and classical studies -- but they can't do computer science. That's right. Shocking though it is, computers or programming or any other information technology subject cannot be found on the list of Leaving Cert subjects.

Why? Because that would mean all schools would need a computer room with a few dozen computers and broadband access. And in spite of the boom, we can't afford it.

Instead of spending the education budget on computer rooms or even updating some of our disgraceful old school buildings, we gave it away to the teachers in extravagant pay hikes.

Many fee-paying private schools do have computer rooms, but many of the free public schools don't have any computers at all, so the subject can't be put on the Leaving Cert curriculum.

On Monday, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen made a big deal out of promising more computers for schools over the next three years. But we're in such financial trouble now that we can afford only one "teaching" laptop for every classroom. A few years ago, at the height of the boom, the then-minister promised a laptop for every student!

What Cowen said this week was that every classroom in the country will get a teaching laptop and a digital projector within the next three years as part of a €150 million initiative. The first phase, in junior schools, will see €22 million in grants before the end of the year. Funding for the laptops in high schools will begin in the New Year.

It's a start, but teachers pointed out that the €22 million will do little to bridge the technology gap that has developed between Irish schools and our Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) neighbors.

Ireland ranks 19th in the OECD league in relation to the use of computers in classrooms. And there's a long way to go before computer science can become a Leaving Cert subject.

To make matters worse, during the boom we failed to invest in the expansion of the broadband network, so that now we have one of the worst levels of broadband access in Europe.

This situation is shameful, particularly because Irish kids have shown a facility for computers, programming and so on. Yet instead of studying computer science in school they spend hours and hours every week studying Irish, which few of them will ever use and which is useless in the struggle to get a job, either at home or overseas. (Unless, of course, you find yourself a cozy hole in one of those Irish language quangos on the state payroll.)

On the question of languages, Irish children are still among the worst in Europe. Part of the reason for that is the huge amount of school time taken up each week by compulsory Irish.

Although the Leaving Cert curriculum now includes Russian and Japanese, most Irish children do French, German or Spanish and, of those, the vast majority do French. This situation has persisted, even though Spanish is now a much more important world language, simply because most of the teachers did French at school.

Overall, the Irish school system still produces kids with a liberal arts education that poorly equips them for the practicalities of the job market in today's challenging global environment. Today's Leaving Cert kids should be coming out of schools with good math, excellent English and one or more foreign languages, as well as a good grounding in either business, science or information technology.

Instead of that, many of them arrive in university or on the job market and have to start from scratch.

At one time that did not matter so much. There was time and a willingness to hire people and train them.

But now it does matter, in an ever more competitive world in which former Third World countries like India have tens of thousands of computer literate young people.

Just how much this matters was illustrated last weekend in the Irish Independent newspaper which sent a reporter down to the town of Youghal in County Cork, once a center for industry in the region. The reason for the reporter's visit was that last week the last factory left in Youghal closed down. The headline on the report was “Ghost Town.”

Youghal was once a mini boom town, famous for Youghal carpets which once employed 3,500 people. It finally closed a few years back.

Other plants had also set up in the town, including Artesyn electronics, Kodak, Seafield Textiles -- all gone over the past decade -- and the last one which closed last week, Tytex medical. The Tytex jobs are going to Slovakia and Thailand. Artesyn sent its jobs to China, Kodak to Poland, and so on with other industries in the town.

It's all down to globalization and the failure of Ireland over the past decade to keep costs and pay rates down so that we are competitive with the rest of the world. We were all so dazzled by our booming economy that we failed to notice that our manufacturing jobs were vanishing overseas, and our boom was being prolonged by an unsustainable construction bubble.

Now that bubble has burst, the real jobs in manufacturing are no longer here and we have very little to replace them.

There is desperation about what to do now in Youghal, a beautiful seaside town, and vague plans for expansion of tourism in the area don't inspire confidence. Tourism is only a small part of any solution.

The problem for us as a country is that there are dozens of towns like Youghal around Ireland that once had industries that gave local people jobs. Now those jobs have gone to cheaper locations in our ever shrinking, more globalized world.

There's not much we can do about it. But giving every school in Ireland a properly equipped computer room might be a good way to start.

Thierry Henry, the World Cup thief

November 25, 2009, 1:31 PM

A tidal wave of public anger swept across Ireland last Wednesday when Thierry Henry cheated us out of a possible place at the World Cup.

Then last weekend there was a real deluge when Ireland was hit by a huge storm that dumped so much rain on us half the country seemed to be under water. It never rains but it pours.

The flooding caused by the rain was unprecedented. Vast areas of farmland were submerged, roads were impassable, towns were knee deep in water.

The worst hit was Cork City, where the flood waters contaminated a water treatment plant and left half the city with no drinking water. Pictures of parts of Cork along the river looked like New Orleans after Katrina.

In some low lying areas in Ireland, especially in the Shannon basin, we have flooding every few years, with a few dozen homes affected. But this was on a different scale, right across the south and west of the country. It was the worst flooding in living memory, with streets turned into rivers and hundreds of houses and shops under two or three feet of water.

Already there are demands for an investigation into our inadequate flood water management. Certainly the ESB (the electricity company) did not help by releasing huge quantities of water from overloaded dams a few miles up from Cork.

But the truth is that this was a once in a century event, a freak act of nature leading to flooding that could not have been prevented without spending billions. And we don't have billions to blow on guarding against something that may not happen again for a century, even if global warming is making our winters wetter.

So people here are mopping up and getting on with it. There's no one to blame except the Great Rainmaker himself, so there's no point in getting angry.

But Thierry the Thief is a different matter.

Even as people were cleaning up after the flood, Thierry the Thief was still being talked about. In fact it's all people here have talked about since his handling of the ball last Wednesday night knocked us out of the World Cup. It led to a national outpouring of rage and scorn that surpasses anything I've seen in years.

There are various reasons for this. Part of it is our disappointment at missing the World Cup. The bigger part of it is the blatant injustice involved.

I had been at the previous game in Croke Park with my soccer mad 16-year-old son, and Ireland had put in a performance that was disappointing. But last Wednesday in the return game in Paris, the Irish boys played out of their skins, humiliated the mighty French team with all its stars and deserved to win.

We had a real chance of pulling it off when Thierry Henry handled the ball, not once but twice, in a goal mouth flurry that ended in the score that put us out. It was so blatant that it was beyond doubt.

The first time the ball hit his arm it just might have been accidental. The second time was clearly deliberate, as he cupped the ball with his hand to stop it going out of play.

Unless you have been on the moon for the past week, you will have seen it on TV. You will have seen Henry looking down and deliberately catching the ball with his hand to keep it in play. And you will have seen the desperate pleas from the Irish players to the referee.

The shock was all the greater because it was Thierry Henry, football's Mr. Clean, one of the ambassadors for soccer's Fair Play campaign. Later he tried to undo some of the damage by admitting that he had handled the ball, although he claims it was instinctive, rather than deliberate.

Well yes, Thierry, no one thinks that you planned to do it, but even allowing for the fact that it happened in a split second and not in slow motion, the way you looked down and cupped the ball was a clear giveaway. It was done deliberately.

Henry was aware immediately that he had cheated and that the goal should have been disallowed. But instead of rushing over to the referee to tell him what had happened, he shuffled off to celebrate with his teammates, even if he did look guilty and embarrassed.

Even worse was his behavior after the game when he sidled over to where a devastated Richard Dunne had collapsed on the grass and sat down beside him to offer consolation. Henry admitted to Dunne that he had handled the ball.

But it was too late. Just as Henry's subsequent statement in favor of a replay of the game was too late, coming after soccer’s governing body FIFA had already ruled that out.

There was more than a suspicion that what was really going on then was that Thierry the Thief was beginning to realize that he had a major problem on his hands (particularly his left hand). The Ireland-France game had been the biggest soccer match on global TV that night and had been watched by a few hundred million people, all of whom had seen Henry cheat.

Soon Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen and the French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy were involved. The French minister for sport admitted that it was a shameful way for France to qualify. A national opinion poll in France showed that 80% of French people were unhappy with what had happened and thought the game should be played again.

So Thierry the Thief was deep in the merde. Mr. Clean was starting to look as dirty as a lot of other people in soccer.

And as well as the hundreds of million of TV viewers who had seen what he did, there were the people in Adidas and Gillette who had been watching as well. The people who pay him millions because he is Mr. Clean. No wonder he started calling for a replay!

The FAI's response (the organization that runs soccer in Ireland) concentrated on the damage that had been done to "the integrity of the game" before a worldwide audience. The scale of what had happened was different, the FAI said, and required a response from FIFA.

This was certainly true. We are all familiar with the diving and handballs that can be seen now and then in soccer games in professional leagues.

Blatant examples are always punished. But very often there is an element of doubt and referees don't always get it right and everyone accepts that.

But the Henry incident was different. It was a clear and blatant example of a handball. And it happened not in a league but in a vital international match in which a place at the World Cup was at stake.

To make it even more contentious, it allowed a big country like France to rob a small country like Ireland of something that meant so much to the whole of Ireland. And it did so after a heroic display of effort and courage by the Irish team.

In that sense, the FAI's view that this was on a different scale was correct. Goliath had stomped on David. FIFA, already a suspect organization, was again exposed as caring little about the smaller nations.

Even worse was the fundamental question being asked in many Irish homes that night by kids who had been sitting there in their Irish shirts watching the game on TV. How could this be allowed? How could somebody cheat like that and get away with it?

How could Ireland be put out of the World Cup like that? It was unfair!

Like a lot of dads all over Ireland that night, I struggled to find an answer. The thing is, there isn't an answer, other than that soccer is a beautiful game but a rotten sport.

FIFA's response that the referee's decision must stand shows that the rules are just as much in need of urgent reform as FIFA itself. The truth is that FIFA wants the big nations at the World Cup and does not care if little nations have to be trampled on to make this happen.

Here's one suggestion -- make video refereeing with instant replay a part of all World Cup games. FIFA says it is against the introduction of this (even though it is common in so many other sports) because small countries could not afford it. The answer is that the technology can be provided, at least for World Cup qualifier matches.

And if FIFA won't go that far, here's another suggestion -- have the TV coverage of all World Cup qualifier games reviewed by a FIFA committee the day after they are played and in the cases like Henry the Hand ban the player from the World Cup finals.

If that had been in place last Wednesday, there is no way Thierry the Thief would have cupped the ball the way he did.

When it rains it pours; Murphy's Law prevails in Ireland

December 2, 2009, 11:29 AM

You know Murphy's Law. If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.

Well, that's the way things were in Ireland over the past week. It seemed like everything and everybody -- man, nature and God -- was conspiring against us.

Man -- Irishmen -- has already ruined the Irish economy. Our prosperity is gone, unemployment is soaring and next week we face into the toughest budget in living memory to get the state finances under control, a budget which is going to lower our standard of living sharply and be extremely painful for everyone.

Last week nature added to our misery when the worst floods in a century hit places all over Ireland after weeks of heavy rainfall. Then when everyone was knee deep in freezing, filthy water, a huge storm with icy temperatures and gale force winds hit the country over the weekend to compound the suffering.

Even God -- represented by the Catholic Church -- seemed to be against us. The report of the judicial investigation into child sexual abuse by priests in the Dublin diocese was finally published last week and revealed that a succession of bishops over many decades had known what was going on but covered it up. This allowed even more children to be abused.

Some of the best-known bishops in the country over the past 50 years were implicated. It was shameful and deeply shocking.

It was indeed a black week in Ireland. All the news was bad. The despair and depression in the air were almost tangible.

The TV cameras followed Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen as he trudged through flooded streets in midland towns wearing his rubber boots and his raincoat, urging people not to be too downcast and miserable. The words pot, kettle and black came to mind.

Let's face it. There is no reason to smile at the moment. We're used to a drop of rain in Ireland, but this was rain on a Biblical scale. If Noah's Ark had come floating down the Shannon last week no one would have been surprised.

Of course, the widespread flooding could not all be blamed on Mother Nature. Yes, most of it was due to the very heavy rainfall that caused rivers to burst their banks and flood vast areas of farmland, particularly in the midlands and the west on both sides of the Shannon.

Parts of Cork City were awash, and low-lying areas in towns all over the country were swamped. Pictures of boats being rowed down streets and people being rescued from their houses filled the TV news and the papers.

But there was another factor at work that had made the bad situation even worse. During the construction boom of the Celtic Tiger years houses were built everywhere here, on river banks, in boggy fields, even on lands that were known to be flood plains close to lakes and rivers.

The more concrete was poured and the more roads were built, the less the surrounding ground was able to cope with heavy rainfall. And last week we paid the price for that greedy madness.

We also seem to have forgotten some uncomfortable facts. Like the fact that most towns and cities in Ireland are built on rivers, and most of them have some streets that are low-lying and therefore prone to flooding.

Usually this only happens every 20 or 30 years. The number of buildings swamped is usually small, people mop up and in between the floods people forget.

But what happened last week was on a different scale, as the spectacular TV pictures of the center of Cork City under water demonstrated. With global warming, we now have to accept that more severe and frequent flooding is going to be a part life here in the future.

There's no point in blaming the government, as many people here tried to do last week, saying flood defenses were inadequate and the government should have been better prepared to deal with flooding on a big scale. People were demanding that the government give millions to those affected by the floods and spend more millions to improve flood defenses.

But the reality is that people need to start taking responsibility themselves for where they live. There is also the fact that the widespread flooding of farmland in the midlands, on both sides of the Shannon, is nothing new, even if the scale this time was greater than normal.

Ireland is shaped like a big saucer that slopes very gently towards the center, through which the Shannon flows. When rainfall across the center of Ireland is heavy that's where the water goes, and the only place it can get out to the sea is through the mouth of the Shannon. The land around much of the Shannon is almost flat, so flooding is normal rather than highly unusual.

Local politicians have for decades been building political careers on promises to have the Shannon drained. More drainage works would probably help, but the truth is that a better drained center channel last week would have led to a faster flow downstream and caused even worse flooding in areas in the lower Shannon.

The answer to all this, of course, is proper planning and an end to the system that allowed people with political influence to build in unsuitable areas. That and an acceptance that in future some low lying streets may have to be turned into public parks, and some areas around the Shannon may have to be treated as summer grazing rather than all year farmland.

While all this was going on last week, the judicial report into clerical child abuse in the Dublin diocese was published. It made grim reading.

The number of priests involved over the years was extraordinary, completely demolishing the frequently heard defense that the priesthood did not have a higher proportion of pedophiles than the general population.

Even more grim were the revelations about how four archbishops of Dublin, beginning with the famous John McQuaid, and some of their auxiliary bishops, had all known and done nothing to protect children. Instead they moved the priests from one parish to another as complaints were made, or assigned them to other duties.

In one case these other duties even included acting as chaplain to a children's hospital, and in other cases little attempt was made to keep them away from children.

What is clear is that the priority of the bishops all the time was to protect the reputation and the assets of the church, even if it meant that the priests involved remained free to abuse again. And they did abuse again, in some cases dozens of other children and in at least one case over 100 other children.

This investigation in the Dublin diocese headed by a judge is the second in Ireland, and was prompted by revelations at the first inquiry in the Wexford area some years ago. Now there are calls to have similar judicial investigations in every diocese in the country on the reasonable assumption that the same thing was happening everywhere here.

Will this be the final nail in the coffin of the Catholic Church in Ireland? Perhaps. Certainly the reputation of the church here is in tatters, even among the faithful.

Meanwhile, everyone here is nervously anticipating the budget next week, not least the state workers who know that the state payroll has to be cut. Already state workers had a one-day strike last week and another one is planned for this Thursday. But they blew whatever public support there was for them last week when it emerged that a lot of them had used the strike day to go north to shop.

The five-mile tail back on the motorway into Newry that day can't have been a coincidence. The word traitors was used in some of the commentary on what had happened.

Schools were shut, hospitals were dealing only with emergencies and other state services were badly hit. People here were furious with the teachers, medical staff and the other workers involved across the public service.

The fact is they are among the best paid state workers in Europe and have guaranteed pensions of 50% of their final salary, something that very few private sector workers have these days. Ireland can't afford this anymore. But our vast army of state paid workers doesn’t want to accept the inevitable.

A serious division is now opening up here between the state workers and the private industry workers and it could get very nasty.

Last week was bad. But believe me, there's worse to come.