Bored of anti-public sector rhetoric

IF there is a whipping boy in Ireland these days, it can reasonably be said to be the public service. Everybody wants the wage bill cut, the numbers drastically reduced and the ranks of private sector workers to be swollen by the castaways.

Good friends, whose opinions I generally respect, tell me the public sector is a parasite on the working population of the nation and must be downsized and, in some extreme cases, axed. They tell me it is a dinosaur that doesn’t offer value for money and is peopled by lazy, incompetent and work-shy people.
I am saying no and wish to challenge this mindset because it is not the talk of reasonable people. This is the claptrap of brainwashed, abused and exploited people who are employed, or incarcerated in private sector employment. I will state at this point that I occasionally hear this kind of rhetoric from those employed in the public service who always, coincidentally, feel it is others and not them who are guilty of ripping off the state.
The public service is what its name denotes; services for the public. It provides these services not out of a desire to create profit. In theory it should be self-sustaining but in reality this is difficult to achieve especially in a politically marketable, low tax economy.
In 2010, I came across two distressing and similar cases. One woman in her 50s and and another in her late 20s were both diagnosed with cancer. At the time of writing, I am delighted to say that both are in remission. Both have received extensive treatment through the National Health Service in England and Scotland. Their treatment was fast, effective and free at the point of delivery. They were lucky enough to be served by an effective public service that not only saved their lives but did so quickly and effectively.
Both are employed in the private sector and, despite their dedication to their jobs when they were well, after a short few weeks, the statutory time limit for sick leave, they found themselves existing solely on benefits.
Both are dedicated members of staff where they work and diligent workers who take their work home and give their leisure hours over to advancing the futures of the companies they work for. Yet when they became unwell, they were essentially cut loose by their employers.
Some might say they were lucky to retain their jobs at a time like this but that is another example of the mindset outlined in the first paragraph. These women were given a message, not in a letter, but in the actions of their employers – we won’t fire you because we legally can’t.
If you don’t die or recover to the point where you can once again come and continue to help us generate profit then you are welcome back. If you die, you die. If you continue to be weakened and ravaged by the cancer inside you then you are the State’s problem; live on benefits.
Harsh as this sounds, it is reality. What is especially distressing is that the rhetoric used to indoctrinate the people of Ireland by the pro-private sector and the neo-liberal politicians, who have ruled the country for the past 20 years has sunk into people’s minds and established itself as a bedrock.
I am certain I am not alone in remembering an advertisement for one of the larger banks in Ireland which ran in or around six or seven years ago. It portrayed a bank manager sitting behind a desk while young people came to him and lied about the reasons they wanted a loan.
For those of us who could not see through the tissue of lies, as the gormless bank manager could not it seemed, the ad men kindly put subtitles on the screen to translate. A trip to the dentist translated as a trip to Amsterdam as far as I remember. It stands as a staggeringly blatant example of the kinds of practices used by these private companies to maximise their profits.
They used these profits to pay massive bonuses. They lent money to developers to construct unneeded estates and they lent to ordinary people to buy the houses in them. When the extent of their greed-driven folly was revealed, they were bailed out by the state. Their debts hang like a millstone around the neck of the taxpayer and new politicians in the Dáil can do nothing about it.
The public sector is there to serve the public and it is less than economically viable because it is decent to those who work within its structures. This must not be seen as a crime, it must be lauded as a virtue. If the current system of barefaced, neo-liberal capitalism makes it a bad thing for people to receive a decent pension when they reach the end of their working life, for people to receive healthcare when they are sick and for people to have job security if they seek it, then it is the system that is wrong. The private over public mantra of the IMF will be an increasingly familiar one in the coming years for the people of Ireland and I have no doubt that those last remaining public sector employees will continue to be done down by their private sector counterparts, partially due to jealousy but largely due to indoctrination.
A nation is nothing more than a group of people living together who identify themselves by a common thing. This can be a flag, a religion or a song to mention just a few. Why not build a nation on the grounds of a common belief in decency. Ireland has just voted for essentially more of the same. The numbers of children waking up hungry will increase in years to come. The reasons for their hunger will be endlessly debated but if anybody in government tries to challenge the system that perpetuates the misery, they will suffer the gravest consequences. The world is in private hands and those hands serve private interests.