Menu
Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— village December 2009 - January 2010
Harry Browne
this in early December, many of the
world’s newspapers are leading with the extraor-
dinary achievements of a group of remarkable
women. Okay, so the celebrated achievements
of Rachel Uchitel, Jaimee Grubbs, Kalika Moquin
and perhaps other improbably-named “birdies”
(har-de-har) are to do with their alleged capacity
to engage in sexual activities with Tiger Woods.
Liberation has got to start somewhere. The prom-
inence enjoyed by this bevy of beauties (and more
power to them) is a consequence of the media’s
ever-ready shock (shock!) at the fact that a very
attractive and rich person, brimming with com-
petitive ego, and constantly travelling the world,
would have sex with people other than the law-
fully married spouse.
If ever a story should qualify as non-
news under the rubric of dog-bites-man, it’s
this one. Notwithstanding the golfer’s own
“transgressions”-speak, nonsense about the
sanctity of marriage or about the special sanc-
tity of this particular celebrity marriage can be
dismissed out of hand as an excuse for covering
this story the way ice used to cover the North Pole.
Nope, we all know Woods’ behaviour is predict-
able and, frankly, commonplace. We read and
talk about it precisely because it’s a nasty piece
of privacy-invading gossip. No decent newspaper
would go near it. Luckily for our baser natures,
there is no such thing as a decent newspaper; the
Irish Times put it on page .
As several commentators have pointed out
in the midst of the continuing national argu-
ment about the economy, one situation in which
women are slightly more likely than average to
get a fair shake for reasons other than their gen-
ital connections is when they work in the public
sector. This is one of the countless reasons to
reject the prevailing orthodoxy that suggests
public-sector workers have had it too good in
this country. There is a strong argument, on the
other hand, that they (we – I lecture for a living in
a publicly funded third-level institute) have had
it good. I didn’t think much of the benchmark-
ing lark when it was first introduced, but after a
few years I came to address benchmarking with
a polite tip of the hat and thanks from me and
all the family.
But “too good”? The concept is admissible
only in a pragmatic sense; did public-servants’
relative good fortune do serious damage to this
society? It’s very hard to argue that they did – not
when the spectacle of Anglo Irish Bank is there to
remind what a real menace to society looks like, a
menace that is still employing people on six-figure
salaries to try not to do any more harm, at a cost
of billions to the Exchequer. No, the complaints
against public servants that rang through
had a tone of moral-outrage, a way of lashing out
at a different sort of promiscuous Tiger, rather
than containing any practical analysis. Why
should they (we) have secure jobs, half-decent
pensions, reasonable holidays, unions to look
after them...? The question, of course, should
be: why shouldn’t everyone have these things?
There should be no moral superiority about being
exploited more than your neighbour.
The campaign against public servants comes,
of course, at a time when many in the private sec-
tor feel fortunate to be exploited by an employer
as opposed to queuing for the dole. But the crisis
shall pass, eventually, and workers in all sectors
must resist our very own Shock Doctrine, the
use of crisis to roll back the gains made by work-
ers over decades, not only in our wages and con-
ditions but in the provision of public services
(admittedly pretty crummy public-service gains
in Ireland, poster-isle for neo-liberalism).
Ah, but what about “competitiveness”? The
bland acceptance of this word’s applicability to
this crisis, usually preceded by “restore”, has
been one of the great achievements of the Shock
Doctrinaires. And it is a nonsense, firstly because
it should have little relevance to public services,
we don’t pay our nurses a salary that will make
them employable by, say, the Estonian health sys-
tem; we are not (yet) in the position where we
are flogging our civil service on the world mar-
ket. The fact that our wages are high compared
to other EU states is not
surprising; most things are
more expensive here.
But shouldn’t we be
cutting salaries across the
economy, with public-sec-
tor workers setting a good
example, so that we can
“competitively” sell our
private-sector goods and
services abroad? Well, believe it or not, we’re
doing just fine with that. In the midst of the
greatest global economic crisis in decades, Irish
exports rose by per cent to June of this year.
In December we learned that Irish manufac-
turing output had risen. And remember, that’s
without any evidence of substantial cuts in pri-
vate-sector wages. Google Michael Burke’s arti-
cle, “Ireland: The Nature of the Crisis”, Socialist
Economic Bulletin for a detailed, rigorous and
eye-opening explanation of what we’ve been
going through. The “competitiveness” nar-
rative is, as Burke writes, “a misjudgment, at
least”. But don’t expect to read that sort of
sober analysis in Irish newspapers, which, even
as they die out, are still very much in the busi-
ness of delivering all sorts of shocks. We are
literally the poorer for it.
“…we all know Woods’
behaviour is predictable and,
frankly, commonplace.”
,
