It was a Dubliner, Robert Tressell, who coined the phrase Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists as the title for his classic novel of 19th-century working-class life. He used it to indicate the irony of a system in which the downtrodden poor subsidise the pleasures of the rich. In 21st-century Dublin, bus drivers regard themselves as the Blue-Trousered Philanthropists. With considerable reason, they see their own low wages as a subsidy to a very wealthy Government.

Low rates of pay in Dublin Bus - a basic wage of between £207 and £273 a week - are, they argue, a direct reflection of the fact that, unlike almost every major city in Europe, Dublin's bus system receives very little state subsidy.

As the National Bus and Rail Union put it last Tuesday as they began a one-day strike, "That low subsidy has been subvented by Dublin Bus workers through low wages". With the possibility of further strikes, many of those who ended up walking to work on Tuesday might add that they, too, are paying the price of official neglect of public transport.

No one really denies that public transport has been the victim of long years of mismanagement and misgovernment. Just last month the Minister with responsibility for CIE and its subsidiary companies, Mary O'Rourke, said that public transport in Ireland was "widely perceived as a poor-quality service - unreliable, slow, inefficient and bad value for money".

It is hard to imagine ministers for health or education owning up to such stark failure in their area of responsibility. But the state of public transport is so poor that the legacy of neglect has become literally undeniable.

Even where resources are being committed, moreover, the actual delivery of better services to the public has been extraordinarily slow. The long-promised Greystones and Malahide extensions to the DART rail service have taken a long time to get on track.

And while the triumphant announcement that the first section of the first line of the Luas light rail system will be operational by the end of 2002 seemed liked good news, it has to be placed in the context that the first two full lines were supposed to be up and running in or before this year.

Nor is there much evidence that, in spite of the belated commitment of serious resources to public transport, the Government has accepted the basic principle that buses are a part of the city's infrastructure, as worthy of subsidy as roads, sewerage or street lights. On the contrary, State funding of the Dublin bus system has been in steady decline.

In 1987 the Government grant to Dublin Bus was £15.59 million. In 1998, the last year for which annual accounts are available, it was just £8.9 million. With rising passenger numbers, this represents a drastic decline from a subsidy of 10p per passenger in 1987 to less than 4p per passenger a decade later.

With fares rising relatively slowly, the missing money has had to come from somewhere. Though cost-saving measures like the shift to one-person operation have made a substantial contribution, there is little doubt that the drivers' basic wages have also contributed much of the absent subsidy.

This is not to say that bus work has ever been well paid. On the contrary, public transport jobs have traditionally been near the bottom of the employment ladder and labour relations have consequently been marked by a long history of bitterness. The assumption of many Dubliners that bus strikes come more often than the buses themselves is belied by the relative peace of recent years. But it does reflect a folk memory of long and fierce disputes in the 1970s and 1980s.

In spite of such apparent militancy, however, bus workers have never really broken out of their place near the bottom of the labour hierarchy. Arguably, bus workers are among the groups who have lost out in national wage deals, tied to percentage increases that make little allowance for the fact that they were starting from a very low base.

What has changed is both the nature of their work and the relative attractiveness of the job. On the one hand, few would argue that driving around in Dublin traffic all day has not become a considerably more stressful and unpleasant job in the last decade. And on the other, a booming economy has given many younger workers far better options than driving for Dublin Bus.

Traditionally, Dublin Bus got away with paying low wages because it could offer its workers almost infinite amounts of overtime. Drivers and conductors made up a decent wage by adding shift allowances, Sunday working and interminable hours to their basic wage.

It was not unknown for bus workers to spend substantial periods working two full shifts each day for all seven days of the week. The cost in terms of family life, long-term health and sheer drudgery may have been considerable, but for men from relatively poor backgrounds with few formal qualifications, the opportunity to earn relatively large wages seemed worth the price.

Now, however, younger workers are less willing to trade health, social and family life for a fairly ordinary standard of living. Even with unsocial hours, Sunday shifts and overtime, bus drivers end up with wages that are far from remarkable.

In an economy that is beginning to experience labour shortages, there is no longer much reason to feel grateful just for having a job. Especially for the younger drivers, there are alternatives in the economy to working a 60-hour week just to make a living wage. This is why the basic wage, without the allowances and overtime, has come into focus as a key issue.

In this sense, the renewed militancy of the Dublin Bus drivers marks a cultural shift no less characteristic of the tiger economy than exotic coffee bars and designer drugs. Leisure time has become a resource to be sold, but only if the price is right. The days of the Irish man and woman, whether building motorways or nursing patients or driving buses, being grateful to work all the hours that God sends, are over.

In the new economy, professionals expect that extraordinary demands in the workplace - long hours, endless stress - will reap extraordinary rewards. Why should blue-collar workers performing essential tasks expect any less?

The bus drivers face an awkward paradox, however. Precisely because they have been in effect subsidising the public transport system, it is very difficult for Dublin Bus to meet their demands for a 20 per cent pay rise.

Operating as it is within unreasonably tight margins, Dublin Bus is almost certainly unable to come up with the extra £9 million a year it would cost to meet the claim. Because the level of subsidy is so low, paying the drivers a decent wage would push Dublin Bus, which makes an operating profit of a little over £1 million a year, into the red.

That, in turn, means that the drivers can only get what they deserve if the Government reverses its refusal to subsidise Dublin Bus at the level that prevails in most European cities. And in fact the current tendency of Government policy is in precisely the opposite direction. It is moving towards the liberalisation of the Dublin transport market, with the public transport service to be put out to competitive tender.

In the short term, the contract will undoubtedly go to Dublin Bus, but the logic of the system suggests that within five years or so the pressure will be to eliminate all subsidy so as to avoid the distortion of competition between rival bus companies.

In that context, the Dublin Bus drivers are trying to puncture the wheels of a policy that has been gathering speed without much public debate and without commuters paying a great deal of attention. They are posing a question that those commuters may have time to contemplate on the long walk to work: do we want a genuinely public transport service and are we prepared to pay for it?

fotoole@eircom.net