Agenda behind pensions witch hunt

I am finding it difficult to define where exactly my sympathies lie in regard to the current clamour about pensions.

On the one hand, we see huge pensions paid out to former State and private office holders and on the other, we see a witch hunt orchestrated by people whose agendas I would question.
Of course, I have great sympathy for those people who are out of work with no pension at all. Their plight is worsened by the fact that a lot of their misfortune may have been caused by the very people who are themselves in receipt of big pensions while they are still working.
But my dilemma is caused by the credentials of those who are leading the campaign. I do not believe they are too concerned about the unfair society in which we live. This campaign has not been orchestrated by the opposition parties in the Dáil but by a section of the media whose sole interest is in selling newspapers or gaining new listeners.
There is nothing wrong with that motive. The more papers they sell and the more listeners they attract, the happier I will be. But what I hate to see is policy being dictated by newspaper headlines. I would much prefer to see those issues decided after lively debate in the Dáil. That’s not going to happen.
We now have a situation where politicians and others are terrified by the media. Last week, EU Commissioner Maire Geoghegan-Quinn and Labour TD Emmet Stagg believed they were entitled to their respective pensions.
I presume they still believe they are still entitled to them. But because of a witch hunt started by the media, they have had to surrender those pensions.
Freedom of the press is a vital cog in our democratic system but I am afraid that this freedom might be in danger of going too far in certain circumstances. They value the freedom of the press in any country where they have it but sometimes I think people such as Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela might have had good reasons when they curtailed those freedoms in their respective countries.
I do not want to devote this column to discussing the issue of freedom of the press because it is a very complex question that would need much more detailed analysis than I can give it in one short article. One man’s freedom, for instance, is another man’s witch hunt.
The press in England is accepted to have fantastic freedom but one can argue about that too. It has the freedom to launch hate campaigns – think of how they treated innocent Irish people such as the Maguires or the Guilford Four, for example.
Could you see a paper such as the Daily Telegraph or even the Daily Mail launch a hate campaign against the vast fortunes paid out by the taxpayer in salaries, maintenance and pensions to the extended members of the royal family in that country?
But enough of that. Personally, I do not believe that people like Maire Geoghegan Quinn or Bertie Ahern should be paid any kind of pensions while they are still working. Yet are you going to extend that to every garda and soldier when they retire in their early fifties? I think not.
I would much prefer to see Maire Geoghegan-Quinn or Bertie Ahern give up their pension rights on a voluntary basis without any pressure from the baying mob. Better still, I would prefer to see legislation preventing politicians from being paid any pensions while still working as politicians. But that’s coming.
That brings me to the question of Brian Cowen’s leadership, or lack of it, and his attitude to this subject. He has been lambasted in the press for his failure to order Bank of Ireland boss Richie Boucher to hand back his €1.5m. pension top-up and for not telling Maire Geoghegan-Quinn to surrender her pension.
Those would have been the politically correct things to do. That’s the way cute-hoor politics is played but Brian Cowen is not a man who plays to the gallery. That, in some people’s minds, is a major fault with Brian Cowen.
Our Taoiseach has, of course, his faults but dancing to a tune composed by the media is not one of those faults and that’s one of the reasons why he is possibly the most unpopular Taoiseach of all time.
Generally speaking, he tells it as it is and not as we or he would like it to be. If he had the power to take back those pensions I imagine he would have exercised that power but the fact is that he does not have that power.
During the week he was accused by one political commentator of failing to “offer hope or reassurance during the most devastating of recessions to strike this country”.
If he does offer hope he is accused of not telling the truth. In other words, he is in a no-win situation. If he offers leadership, it is spurned and if he doesn’t, he is useless.
How can he possibly win friends or influence people? Answers please to the Government press office.