Sitting comfortably? Relaxed? Let’s see if we can change that. Let’s see if we can make you angry, like Alan O’Brien on The Frontline last Monday night when he berated Pat Kenny over his €600,000-a-year salary. A towering inferno of gesticulating fury.
Anger is not a policy, according to economist Colm McCarthy, and yet everyone in the country seems to be incensed. So you should be. Let us begin.
Despite taking a 10% pay cut last year, Brian Cowen is still the best paid leader in Europe. This country, on its knees financially, pays its taoiseach more (€257,024) than Germany pays its chancellor (€228,000) or France its president (€240,000). Ministers running tiny government departments — the likes of Eamon Ó Cuiv and Martin Cullen — are earning €202,676, far more than the prime minister of Japan (€170,000), a country of 128m people.
But ministers are paragons of frugality compared with the chief executives of semi-state companies. Declan Collier, head of the Dublin Airport Authority, is still paid €570,000 a year following a 10% pay cut. That’s more than twice Gordon Brown, prime minister of the UK with a population of 62m. Still, Collier is worth every cent, right? Dublin airport being so well run and all. (How’s your blood pressure?) Last week it was reported that Ray Burke, the corrupt former minister, is getting a pension of about €100,000 a year. So it takes all the tax paid by four private sector workers earning €100,000 a year just to pay the pension of that tax-cheating, bribe-taking crook.
Also, Bertie Ahern, the taoiseach who blew the boom, who threw around billions upon billions of taxpayers’ money to ensure his own re-election, is supplementing his book advance, his newspaper column, lucrative speeches on the after-dinner circuit, his annual salary of €100,000 as a TD, plus €50,000 expenses, a suite of offices in Leinster House fitted out at a cost of €220,000, a free car, a driver and a mobile phone — with a pension of €83,250, the entire tax take of another three well-paid private-sector workers (heart beating a little faster?).
They’re all at it. Did you know that every independent TD is paid a “party leader’s allowance” of €41,152? That’s our money being used by the government to induce independent TDs — including Michael Lowry — to support them. Do you realise that any TD who lives more than 15 miles from Leinster House — in, say, Skerries or Straffan — gets an “overnight allowance”? That one TD or senator in five employs a relative, at your expense, costing €45,000 a year? That one in three has another source of income? And that all of them get “walking around money”— is that our way of saying: “Thanks for representing us”? (How’s the adrenaline? Up a notch?) At this point, private-sector workers should move throwable objects out of reach. Did you see that report from the comptroller and auditor-general recently which found that six out of 10 civil servants took sick leave in 2007? The average female employee in a state department was missing for 14 days.
But they’ll all be out on strike in nine days’ time — oh yes, led by gardai in those silly blue caps. The same ones who enjoy more than 50 different allowances on top of their salaries, such as the premium payments (€9m a year) paid to officers who are on leave, because they can’t claim the unsocial hours allowance. And the clerical allowance (€2m a year) for gardai who are engaged in clerical duties and therefore can’t claim other allowances, particularly not the unsocial-hours one. Our favourite is the plain-clothes allowance (€1.9m a year), paid to those who are not getting the uniform allowance. Because they need to buy plain clothes — unlike the rest of us.
Marching behind the gardai will be teachers. Many private-sector workers now have to take a day off on November 24 to mind their children so that teachers who are paid well above the OECD average can march, block traffic, and shout about “cutbacks”. These teachers won’t even agree a transfer system with the Department of Education to allow 175 surplus staff in 88 second-level schools (cost: €11m[) to be moved to other secondary schools where there aren’t enough teachers. (You’re cursing under your breath now, right?) The real culprits are the bankers, of course — specifically, Anglo Irish Bank. Its reckless lending policy overheated the property market until it exploded. It borrowed €7 billion from Irish Permanent to pretend its balance sheet was healthy. Meanwhile Sean FitzPatrick, its chairman, was hiding €122m of personal loans with his good pal Michael Fingleton at Irish Nationwide, pausing only to lecture us about the evils of universal child benefit and the “sacred cow” of medical cards for the over-70s.
Fingleton, by the way, has never given back the €1m bonus he took shortly after Irish taxpayers propped up his building society last autumn. He probably can’t afford to — sure, how would he make do with only his €27.6m pension pot?
Over a year ago the powers that be set up five inquiries into the carry-on at Anglo. Not one of them has concluded. None of the Anglo 10 — the golden circle who got loans from the bank to buy its own shares — has even been interviewed. While pensioners and the unemployed face Christmas without a bonus, families figure out a way to cope with reduced child benefit, and thousands more lose their jobs or have their pay cut, the banking boyos are in Portugal. Bernie Madoff is in jail, and they’re on the golf course. Now you’re angry, right?
WELL, mildly irritated perhaps. Because while the media can and occasionally have stoked people into a frenzy, experts say the national mood is more phlegmatic. “I don’t think we do sustained anger,” said Gerard O’Neill, chairman of Amarach Research. There have been riots in Riga, Sofia and Greece, but the headquarters of Anglo Irish is still standing on St Stephen’s Green, and not so much as a pane of glass has been shattered on Kildare Street.
“Since April, the level of anger has not changed an awful lot,” O’Neill said. “On any given day, about 12% feel angry, and that has been fairly constant. Using the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — it seems to us that people have gone past the anger and the bargaining, and are now at depression.”
The angry phase was hardly dramatic. The highlight was AIB shareholder Gary Keogh pelting the bank’s chairman, Dermot Gleeson, with eggs at an emergency general meeting in May. Keogh, 66, had lost €18,000 on AIB shares. “I just don’t like the way these people treat us,” he said. Inevitably, he appeared on Liveline, the nation’s safety valve, immediately afterwards.
More sinister was the petrol bomb thrown at the Department of Finance on Merrion Square in September. It caused a small fire. Footage from CCTV cameras indicated that it was one man acting alone.
Farmers retained the title of the nation’s angriest protesters. In July, 7,000 of them packed into Cavan to picket the constituency clinic of Brendan Smith, the minister for agriculture. Some of them picketed the home of Margaret Conlon, another Fianna Fail TD, and threw eggs at her house.
In September, a group of about 300 farmers broke through a garda cordon protecting a meeting of the Fianna Fail parliamentary party at a hotel in Athlone. And then? Well, nothing. Fianna Fail agreed to meet a delegation, and the rest of the farmers headed off to save the harvest.
Political anger has been much the same. Fianna Fail and the Green party got a kicking from the electorate in the local and European elections last June. But by October everyone had calmed down and meekly said yes to the Lisbon treaty.
Even the public-sector marches have been tame affairs, more in sorrow than in anger. Once the trade union leaders are finished addressing their members from the back of a lorry, they go round the far side of Leinster House to resume negotiations with government officials.
“The number of people on the street now has to be compared with the hundreds of thousands who marched in the early 1980s,” said O’Neill. “I don’t think we’ve seen anything like that level of across the board anger on the streets.”
Chemistry, an advertising agency, does a monthly survey, Zeitgeist, in which it quizzes up to 400 people about how they feel. “Women had been more realistic, and therefore more negative,” a spokeswoman said. “Since May, there have been negative findings for both men and women. A lot of people are saying that they switch off the media. It’s their way of trying to control what’s going on.”
O’Neill paraphrases the famous JK Galbraith saying about private affluence and public squalor, saying what Ireland is experiencing is public anguish and private contentment. “When you talk to people, a lot of them are all right in their personal lives. They are financially under pressure but their family life is fine, so is their health, and they still have friends. A lot of the anger we see is Joe Duffy-style anger, a form of sounding off and public posturing.
“Our surveys find that people are more likely to experience happiness on any given day than they are anger and worry.”
McCarthy’s slogan about anger not being a policy has become a regular rejoinder in heated radio debates about cutbacks. “Anger is not analysis” is another variation. Nobody has come up with a way to refute it. Maybe it’s because, as O’Neill says, we’re in the depression phase.
RTE is not taking any chances, however. After Alan O’Brien’s outburst last Monday night, sources in Montrose say the station is considering how to deal with similar situations on live programmes. Michael O’Brien’s passionate contribution to Questions and Answers in May was powerful but edgy television. O’Brien’s tirade, which has been watched by 100,000 additional viewers on YouTube, could easily have been cut off with an ad break. Copycat attacks on other programmes, especially the Late Late Show, are a cause of concern in RTE.
Soon it may all be over, though. O’Neill predicts that acceptance will come after the budget on December 9. “People will realise that we are all in this together, and we’ve got to sort ourselves out. There’s no going back to the good times but, if we keep our heads and everyone does their bit, we’ll get through this — older, wiser, a bit poorer.” And breathing more easily again.
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