When one of the interminable debates on public sector compensation comes up, usually the right wing is forced to concede that when you compare apples to apples, the genuine private sector counterparts to the public sector get rather good salaries in comparison.

Whatever difference exists, on balance it tends to favour the private sector.

However that does not quieten the bashers of the public sector. "Aha!" they say, "What about the pensions!"

Indeed, what about the pensions?

Pensions for young public sector workers are not part of current spending. They are a promise. They are an IOU.

If you get an IOU from any entity, public or private, it is not acceptable to simply calculate it at face value.

If you had an IOU from the government of Argentina, and you were entering it into your account books, it would be illegal for you to record it at face value. If you were to do so, you would be caught out by the auditor for not keeping proper books of account.

Argentina is a defaulter government, and as such you are required to alter the face value to reflect the risk of future default.

Now, how are we to judge Ireland with respect to honouring her commitments? Well, there is the slight matter of a document called Towards 2016 to consider. It committed the state to paying certain sums. After the deal was entered into, the document was torn up, and sums significantly lower than were agreed upon were actually paid.

Now, most people here are strongly supportive of this act of reneging on a commitment. Doing so was A Good Thing, according to most here. OK, let's accept that. The State can, should and will renege on any monetary commitments it makes to public sector employees which are excessively generous.

This brings a clear corollary: you cannot then claim that public sector pensions are "gold-plated" or "lucrative". They are nothing but promises, which the state can be expected to renege upon when the time comes.

There are myriad ways for a government to break a pension commitment. The simplest of which is to fiddle the inflation statistics, but other ways exist. Now that Towards 2016 has been scrapped, is it any longer honest or defensible to take the state's pension commitments at face value?