An Bord Snip Report to be Published Tomorrow

[JollyRedGiant]

There are currently at least five active threads bashing the public sector on the 'latest discussions' page - yet not a single thread talking about getting the people, who created the economic mess we are in, to pay for wrecking the economy i.e. the 450 people who made €41 billion over the past three years and have a combined wealth of €68billion (that over €150million a piece) - or the companies that made €83billion in profit last year and paid the princly sum of €5billion in tax (about 6%).

I wonder why??????

[Murra]

There are currently at least five active threads bashing the public sector on the 'latest discussions' page - yet not a single thread talking about getting the people, who created the economic mess we are in, to pay for wrecking the economy i.e. the 450 people who made €41 billion over the past three years and have a combined wealth of €68billion (that over €150million a piece) - or the companies that made €83billion in profit last year and paid the princly sum of €5billion in tax (about 6%).

I wonder why??????

Excellent point. While cuts are definately needed, this whole palaver is designed to take our eye off the REAL ball

[Digout]

There are currently at least five active threads bashing the public sector on the 'latest discussions' page - yet not a single thread talking about getting the people, who created the economic mess we are in, to pay for wrecking the economy i.e. the 450 people who made €41 billion over the past three years and have a combined wealth of €68billion (that over €150million a piece) - or the companies that made €83billion in profit last year and paid the princly sum of €5billion in tax (about 6%).

I wonder why??????

Agreed, kick off a thread....

[Kf]

There are currently at least five active threads bashing the public sector on the 'latest discussions' page - yet not a single thread talking about getting the people, who created the economic mess we are in, to pay for wrecking the economy i.e. the 450 people who made €41 billion over the past three years and have a combined wealth of €68billion (that over €150million a piece) - or the companies that made €83billion in profit last year and paid the princly sum of €5billion in tax (about 6%).

I wonder why??????

Correct the hatchet job done on the public service and its workers by most of the media and political parties has been shameful. What makes it pathetic is hearing the sh1te that is written and spoken on the media being parroted by the very people that are suffering and will suffer the most from private sector greed, captains of industry self interest and centrist politicians stupidity.

[Sierra]

Merger of local bodies and €1.5bn in welfare cuts proposed

MAJOR LOCAL authorities should be merged, hundreds of millions of euro worth of allowances for State employees should be cut and €1.5 billion should be taken from the social welfare budget, an expert group has recommended in a report to be published today.

[Mar Tweedy]

It could influence Saturday's Green Party special conference, let's not forget.

Which if it is published tomorrow, could indicate a bit of divilment/death wish from your coalition partners.

[Mar Tweedy]

Correct the hatchet job done on the public service and its workers by most of the media and political parties has been shameful. What makes it pathetic is hearing the sh1te that is written and spoken on the media being parroted by the very people that are suffering and will suffer the most from private sector greed, captains of industry self interest and centrist politicians stupidity.

And not forgetting from the same sources who trumpeted the boom. Do we ever learn!

[Jurisprudence]

Hey Red Leveller. Thanks for the detailed reply. Sorry if I came across as defensive or even aggressive. You listed 8 questions to me. When most people see lists they think shopping, when I see them I think cross-examination and go all hostile witness, I think its the training, sorry.

I don't think this is entirely an issue for the public sector causing the financial issue. If someone can find me a bank which during the celtic tiger was part of the public sector please enlighten me, I'd love to demand they be demolished. The private sector banking system has been a party (what a party it must have been) to the destruction of our economy. The fact is, as was stated by the man who misses €8bn in wire transfers, Mr. Lenihan, that the public sector is broken and that happened entirely separate to any banking fraud or housing bubble. Nobody in this country can realistically disagree. However, if I meet a lead banker I will personally make them suffer for what they have done to my country.

I'm sorry but your going to really hate what I have to say next. I personally believe that every employee on the public healthcare system, from top to bottom, should be prohibited by law from obtaining private healthcare insurance. I personally believe it is a poison of the system. The implementation of such a policy is fraught with difficulty, especially with our pathetic outdated excuse for a constitution regards upholding private enterprise and familial protectionism. That may sound very socialist, even communist but it is not. I do believe in universal healthcare but in this instance that is not my rationale. I do feel that if everyone were to be in the same boat as the public patient they would start threading water pretty damn quickly rather than sitting back and watching the ship sink as is happening with the HSE and our hospitals. Its amazing what need can achieve. I spoke to a French friend of mine regards their health system and (maybe its a French thing) he said that their is a far more aggressive nature of complaining and forcing the system to be responsive over there from within. They , the staff, refuse to complain and leave it at that, they demand action as they feel they are a part of the system. I would love that to be the case here. If only we could find a way to make other sectors do the same.

As for my relative I feel they as a family are very myopic and inwardly focused on their own family, as many parents are. I understand such a viewpoint as a parents focus is on their children but when they are gaining benefit from others in the state through social welfare benefits it is no longer acceptable to disregard the bigger picture as others are supporting their family, not just them. To me that is a social contract and with that comes responsibilities towards the state, the public system, the people. It may be 'normal' but it is not acceptable. I should have made my statement more clearly, my bad. Their combination of public position in health, disregard for others on it while accepting payment from those very same people to pay for aspects of their life is a breach of that social contract. I make no exceptions, even for family, my state comes first.

The other in their relationship is in a full time position. Take home pay is apparently approximately equal. Neither is in a management position. I do not have figures for take home pay, sorry.


Now lets get to the knitty gritty

Your quote

"The idea of a "job for life" is old how? It is in people's contracts. It is reality. To say it leads to people backsliding and idling is unsustainable - if that were the case, wouldn't the entirety of our public services be utterly crap? yet they are not - more often than not because of the dedication and hard work of those involved. Take A&E in any major hospital - permanent staff nurses work incredibly hard here. Look at schools and colleges - many excellent, encouraging and hard working teachers and lecturers. What about care services - I used to work (briefly) in this area and the staff (I don't include myself here modest fellow) were really brilliant. People don't work hard simply because they are afraid they will lose their jobs. They work hard because they like their work, or they see it as important, or they feel a part of something useful."

Your points completely expose the failure of your argument. Take A+E. Absolutely. With 7 visits to A+E in the last 8 months (and no bed to admit) I witnessed scenes which amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment and clear breaches of constitutional and human rights. The sheer barbarity of seeing a person with multiple knife wounds bleeding for 10 hours without a bandage or even been seen by a doctor beggars belief and is a clear cause for a lawsuit. In another A+E a man had been brought in via ambulance. He had a collapsed lung. They put him back in the waiting area for 6 hours. You know why: because your A+E staff are not resourced by the rest of their public servant colleagues sitting at desks in the HSE who ARE "backsliding and idling". Because the public servants meant to support them don't give a damn and are more concerned with PR than patient care. Its because A+E docs are working over 80 hours a week (against the law for anyone else) that the doctor who saw me after waiting 8 hours couldn't put a line in and had to be physically removed because he could no longer see my arm correctly. He was found slumped in a chair 5 minutes later from exhaustion. Because I watched a man with late stage pancreatic cancer being told by a senior consultant (increased salary this year to work 37hrs from 33, costing taxpayer €140m while patients die from cutbacks) and his 4 man well dressed entourage (who came on duty late) that they didn't have a bed for him due to resource cutbacks yet I personally overhead them congratulating that same consultant 5 minutes later in an adjoining corridor on the purchase of a new coupe. Those poor sods in A+E are not comparable to the rest of the civil servant class or even their consultant cash cows. You really cannot have been to an "A&E in any major hospital" recently or you would have seen the carnage and collapse of services. Oh wait, you said "nurses work incredibly hard here" so you do or should know the reality. For God sake, Drogheda had to close off its A+E twice this year already and call on every other surrounding service to assist as it simply couldn't cope. In military terms thats 'broken arrow'. That should never occur in an EU hospital. We (the taxpayer) lost €63 million last year in awards against the HSE for negligence and other failures. Negligence caused by the overworked A+E staff and incompetent HSE staff who have caused death, injury and life long disability to patients in their so-called 'care'. And those cases are only beginning due to backlog and a determination by public servants in the HSE to delay the cases getting to court. That bill will rise year on year. Thats on top of the €141 million in absenteeism costs for the HSE alone last year. Maybe they bunked off to go to the funerals of the patients they failed to care for.

As for teachers I have friends who are teachers. They love the extremely long holidays and nice salaries. When they were on TV earlier this year complaining about resource cutbacks leading to support teachers not being renewed they strangely forgot their cushy holidays and not once did they offer a cut in their salary to ensure available funding to keep those teachers. The majority are paid during the summer months = taxpayer pays for them to sit on their collective educational asses. In my low paid private sector job we have already made a deal to cut wages, costs, and no bonuses for 2 years to ensure nobody has to be laid off. And its an extremely tough job at that. If its good enough for us why not the public service. But the teachers still moaned how it would effect the little children. How altruistic. I could smell Bono-style 'its for the starvin children' BS a mile off.

Its nice that people feel progressive in their work, I just won't pay 50% more for you to feel all warm, fluffy and useful doing it. Those contracts stating employees of the civil service have jobs for life should be redrawn due to the changing position of the state which will soon be near collapse. Emergency legislation can be drawn to allow such a move to protect the state from financial ruination. Such contracts are not acceptable in a modern society. The protection of the state is above all else.

As for the care services I have no personal knowledge so I will not comment.


And your other quote

"And if you want to get rid of permanent jobs, I'm with you. As soon as people are guaranteed prompt retraining and re-employment, without a significant reduction in their incomes. As long as redundancy means a risk of losing your home and your kids going without, I don't see how anyone can advocate it."

Sorry but what are you talking about. Your all for getting rid of permanent jobs so long as they are re-trained (at tax payers expense no doubt) and re-hired. That is a permanent job. It means moving an employee from one department and planting him in another. Sorry but if you take a vegetable and throw him behind the meat counter he's still a bloody vegetable. I'm damned if I as a taxpayer am prepared to pay for the move. Your redundancy, rehiring, retraining and redeployment = redundancy compensation, HR costs, training costs (and loss of man-hours worked on top of the €5K to the employee if training is over 8 weeks + 3K more if over 35km away), and more expense to deploy the (probably higher pay grade now) servant into the new position.

As for the meaning of redundancy I honestly think you make a perfect example of the perceived warped attitude of the typical public servant: In this country, like any other, redundancy means potentially losing the house and the kids going hungry. Thats life, it stinks, and its the reality for private sector workers. Just because your not comfortable with the reality facing hundreds of thousands in this country doesn't mean we should have to pay for your fantasy. Redundancy is

1) The state or fact of being unemployed because work is no longer offered or considered necessary.
2) A dismissal of an employee from work for being no longer necessary; a layoff.

The two essential characteristics of redundancy are “change” and “impersonality”. The main theme of redundancy is that it is the job that is made redundant and not the person. It therefore has nothing to do with the person. The position is gone. No company, nor should any government (therefore taxpayer) continue to employ someone who is surplus to requirements. Frontline staff such as A+E crews should not be included as they are as such 'needed' and in no way 'surplus'. There is an abundance of managers and pen pushers we the people of Ireland can do without. This is redundancy, the real thing.

The problem with redundancy is it does not state that the employee was an abject failure in the performance of their duties, which some in the public service are. It also incurs payment by the taxpayer to that former employee. Its a bit like a bin charge when looking at some of the public sector. Your paying to get rid of the trash rather than pay to keep them stinking up the place. Think of it like a really long paid holiday, which those on the public payrole should clearly be used to by now,

Teachers not alone on those long breaks from workplace - National News, Frontpage - Independent.ie

Hundreds of thousands in this country now have a 365 day a year holiday. Its called unemployment due to no fault of their own from the private sector. And many worked a damn site harder than a civil service HSE PR drone.


For many people in this country who are suffering incredibly (not to say some public servants are not at all) the view is that the public sector have only given a small percentage of their perceived largely overpaid salaries so far while with mass unemployment, collapsing healthcare and increased suicide rates others have given all they can and there is nothing left to give. People are taking their lives because they cannot take it any more or give more. If the lowest paid in the public sector feel aggrieved by this vision then they know who to turn their guns on, who to report on: their useless imbecilic management. I'm sure the report will be in glossy magazine form and take a 'taskforce' of advisors to accomplish.


On a military note the whole economic situation feels very 6th army at Stalingrad-ish. We had our flanks exposed, it was obvious to everyone and nobody up high listened to calls from those who knew what was happening on the frontline. Now we are trapped and with our usual Irish mentality we still believe that someone will come to rescue us. Just like Stalingrad and Mannsteins 4th army even if they (another country, EU etc) did try and break us out the world economy dictates that they could only get so far, they are deeply weakened themselves and could not punch through. They won't even try as we owe over 55bn to the EU as it stands and we have already ruined the 1st Lisbon mission. We need to break out ourselves. FF and the rest of our politicians have about as much backbone as your average Nazi party official and are now on their way to extended summer holidays like most public servants (probably in Argentina and Brazil), running away while the rest of us face the continuing collapse. The public service just sit back and soak up remaining resources while complaining how hard life is for them with their little levy. Heil Cowen, Heil Harney, Heil Hitler. They're all the same in reality.

[jmcc]

I wonder if there will be any proposals to cut the salaries and pensions of the parasites in government?

Regards...jmcc

[turdsl]

I will be looking to see if there is a proposal to abolish the Senate it just proved the other day how useless it is,they spent the whole day talking about the criminal justice bill after the Dail had gone on holiday, Mary Harney once said it should be got rid of, that of coarse was before she found it useful for some of her friends who were rejected by the electorate, there will also have to be a recommendation to stop the pensions of serving TDs who are receiving this money at the moment.