Ireland is a small country; essentially single-race, single-religion, it has tended to agree on single ideas, be they bad or good, in politics and in culture. It is hive-minded; an idea takes hold, and is in return held fast by those it initially seized. We achieved an informal and undeclared consensus from the time Charles Haughey came to power 20 years ago that we wanted to be badly and dishonestly governed; and though none of us knew the details of his spectacular corruption, we all of us know the broad outline of the culture which debauched the vitals of this state. Yet despite the conspicuously depraved nature of his regime, he remained at the centre of political life for well over a decade.
Haughey consensus
Three events sum up the Haughey consensus: the Talbot deal, the Gateaux deal, the Saudi jewels. Talbot was the name of the factory in the Haughey constituency in which the entire workforce was put on the State payroll when its parent company wanted to close it down.
Gateaux was the company whose workforce voted to close it down and accept rendundancy payments from their employers. This was cargo-cult economics, symbolised most powerfully by the Saudi jewels, showered on Charles Haughey as Taoiseach, which he insisted on keeping - and, as far as I know, keeps to this day.
We as a people consented to policies of stupidity and corruption, repeatedly, until sated by them; when forced a decade ago by the IMF to rescue our economy from ridicule and ruin, we rapidly established a new consensus which among other things included wage restraint and collective bargaining. This is the social device which we now hail as central to our subsequent economic success, even as collective bargaining threatens our economic well-being.
For the key to moderate wage-claims in the past ten years has not been collective bargaining, but the consensus which underlay that collective expression of will. Public service unions knew that they were cutting the throat of the private sector goose with their incessant and mutually competitive wagedemands. We were broke: all hands to the pumps, and never mind who has the stronger arms.
Those days are over. Collective bargaining made sense only in a crisis; in a rising economy, it cannot cope with the market forces pulling it this way and that. And the market forces now are such that young women and men cannot be induced to enter the nursing profession, with its appalling hours, its physical hardship, its many technical skills and its huge emotional toll for the sort of money now on offer. We are running out of nurses, and indeed doctors too. Moreover, both belong to an international profession which pays higher wages elsewhere; so we lose nurses both through lower recruitment and higher emigration. Meanwhile, we conceal the vast deficiencies in our health service with immigrant labour.
Collective bargaining
To the labourer, the value of his labour. You can hide that truth only for so long behind the benign mask of collective bargaining for public-sector workers. Sooner or later the priorities of real demand take over. Yet we know from our closed wards, from our casualty departments without a single Irish doctor in them, that we have in our hive-mind created a congenial fiction that medicine is cheap, and that the wages of its foot-soldiers should in some mysterious way be linked to those of local government workers in Castlebar or librarians in Coote Hill.
There is no logic to that; yet the combination of our economic success and the extraordinary tales of sin and sleaze in high places - largely during that extinct Gateaux-TalbotSaudi-jewels epoch of consensus stupidity - is unleashing colossal expectations within an already cosseted public service sector. It will not permit the nurses to achieve a market-led pay settlement alone. But it has to, sooner or later.
For the logic is clear enough. We are coming to end of the life-cycle of one form of consensus; we must prepare ourselves for the next consensus. That might be a consensus to return to a competitive wages spiral; we might consent to a war between different sectors of the economy which will take us back to the idiocies and heresies we thought we had left behind. Or we might ease our way towards a consensus of the marketplace, which recognises that in the long run the market governs wages as well as prices, and that highly prized, highly skilled people such as nurses or junior hospital doctors must be paid well - better than other sectors to whose income they are now illogically linked.
Free medicine
This also means that medical treatment must be more costly: that which is cheap, we treat cheaply. That is human nature. What percentage of the population possesses medical cards, with free medicine resulting? How many people actually deserve to have them? Who is prepared to remove these cards from the undeserving?
We have a new and painful consensus to arrive at, one that will be especially unpleasant for those groups which will lose parity with the medical profession. It certainly requires a great deal of political will to bring it about - a commodity we tend to be short of.
So it might seem easier to seek soft economic options; if the Haughey era has taught us one thing it is that finding them leads to disaster.