Heart Beat:"For that reason our Lord God, commonly gives wealth to those coarse asses to whom He grants nothing else." - Martin Luther
I wonder who he was talking about; it must have been the doctors. The Taoiseach is quite scathing about consultant doctors' earnings. Apparently they should just get on with their work and stop criticising and complaining. Not much appreciation there of the doctor's role as advocate for the patient, you might think. Well, let's stop being polite to each other, and remember that you started it, Taoiseach.
Firstly, there are very few of that disparate group called consultants who make more money than you. There is not one who has the same privileged pension rights as yourself and your colleagues. I would like similar provision. A pension for my intern year, another for registrar and then senior registrar years and finally my consultant years; the gravy train's coming, I can hear it down the track; what do you mean, it's full already?
PG Wodehouse described a character who, while not exactly disgruntled, was not gruntled either. That could have been me. I didn't have a State car with driver. I didn't have access to a jet. When I travelled to meetings, I paid for myself. I didn't even have a cosmetic allowance. Not even my lady colleagues had that.
Insight, as my psychiatric colleagues will avow, is a very pertinent and valuable possession. It is disturbing to find that it appears to be in short supply at the top. Did it ever occur to you that possibly you and your colleagues are not qualified to be the best paid political elite in the world? Don't bother telling us that this recent grotesque pay rise was benchmarked against similar salaries in the private sector; for therein lies fallacy. Many of you might never have obtained such situations, and in the event of having so done would not have survived private-sector equivalents of such gems as voting machines, PPARS, attempted decentralisation and chaos in services at many levels. Multiple P45s would have been the order of the day. In the background, a radio announcer tells of possibly 500 P45s at Waterford Wedgwood. That's only the real world; it needn't concern us, Taoiseach.
I accept that we don't have a White House for you, but we as a nation have an official residence with a most worthy occupant called Áras an Uachtaráin. I understand that we also purchased an establishment for the use of the Taoiseach but that it had not been used for this purpose. We really are made of money.
The Élysée Palace, Chequers and 10 Downing Street were all cast nonchalantly into the equation. I look out the window and I see a small country, a dynamic one certainly, but it is still a small country. Comparisons with the US, Great Britain, France or Germany are delusions of grandeur. Please don't turn around after this obscene bonanza and tell us, as a predecessor of yours once did, that we are living beyond our means. We may be indeed, but you're not exactly setting an example of forbearance.
Benchmarking is cited in justification of the plainly unjustifiable; indeed, benchmarking was always a farce wasn't it? There was no way or intention to measure the increases in productivity that were supposed to follow the rising pay levels. Nero and the Roman Emperors gave the masses games. Marie Antoinette allegedly said "let them eat cake".
We dreamt up benchmarking.
There doesn't seem to be any end to the arrogance and sheer effrontery which can ignore public anger and grave disquiet over this and similar recent happenings. Bonus awards for HSE chiefs presiding over disaster and now led by apparently the best paid Minister for Health in the world. Paid positions for almost everybody in your Dáil party, in addition to not inconsiderable salaries; let us pass over expenses. Your pay rise alone, Taoiseach, was more than many qualified nurses earn in a year. This will read well in their negotiations; it will resonate in everybody's negotiations.
I have an uneasy feeling that we have reached a tipping point. Fuel prices rise inexorably, putting further strain on this unprotected nation, which remains, after 10 years of your stewardship, almost totally dependent on fuel imports from abroad. In my innocence, I thought that this was the kind of thing that governments were meant to foresee and guard against on our behalf. Not here apparently; we appear to be rudderless and drifting from shoal to rock, with no helmsman and no credible course set. Does anybody in there read the entrails?
Herbert Spencer wrote that "the ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools". It's time for us to confront and confound folly and its propagators. It is our, using the word advisedly, little country. It is madness to pay our Taoiseach more than any other democratically elected leader in the world. Maybe that's a bit strong; I'm not sure about Robert Mugabe
Horace wrote. "O cives, cives, quarenda pecunia premium est; virtus post nummos", loosely translated as "lads first get the money, money before concern". I hope that's not true of us all.
Lastly, let's not hear the bit about paying peanuts and getting monkeys. In our case it does not appear to be cash-related.
Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon.