Sir, - Kevin Myers (An Irishman's Diary, February 20th) draws unfavourable comparisons between the pay of members of the Defence Forces and the Civil Service. For the record, the pay of members of the Defence Forces had been linked traditionally to grades deemed to be equivalent in the very Civil Service which is so despised by Mr Myers. However, in the past few years this situation has changed in favour of members of the Defence Forces in the light of their well-organised pay campaign.
Incidentally, exactly the same situation applies in respect of nurses and gardai, both of whom had pay linkages to the Civil Service. In other words, they got any increases applied to civil servants, but in recent years, as we know, the Government has capitulated to those groups also in the face of threats of force and their pay increases have been larger. Meanwhile the civil servants have found themselves in relative terms falling behind such groups, punished for the sin of believing that when you make agreements you are obliged to abide by them.
I could provide all sorts of legitimate facts and figures to disabuse Mr Myers of his prejudices about civil service pay rates. I could do likewise in respect of civil service pensions, about which Mr Myers makes some disparaging remarks. I will confine my observation to a suggestion that if Kevin Myers wants to subject his pension arrangements to comparison with those of the civil service I would be happy to facilitate him.
The pay and conditions of civil servants are a matter of public record. It would be interesting to make a comparison with those enjoyed by Mr Myers. Perhaps he would not regard this as a valid comparison, as maybe he regards his job as more worthy of remuneration than that of advising the Government, paying social welfare recipients, supporting industry, building schools, running the courts, building roads, negotiating international agreements, preserving our heritage and (yes Mr Myers), paying and housing members of the Defence Forces. When set against such an array of obviously irrelevant activity, it is clear that Kevin Myers's regular missives to the nation on everything from parking tickets to the price of tea in China perform a much greater and nobler function, thus warranting far better salary and conditions!
It is interesting also that his tirade should have been prompted by an impending trip with Ryanair. This is a company which refuses to negotiate pay and conditions with its own staff if represented by an independent trade union. Mr Myers probably approves of this classic example of the school-room bully. The basic rights of the workers in Ryanair, again a group of people paid less than him, are clearly of no consequence - or if they are, it is probably only for the purpose of approval for an employer who, in accordance with Mr Myers's world-view, knows the value of keeping workers in their place.
On a final point, the actual cause of Mr Myers's outburst is a resentment of a tax imposed on his journey. Taxation is a political issue and civil servants tread cautiously into "political" debate. However, if Mr Myers were open to debate, I could refer him to some interesting recent work which suggests that we are a low-tax society by comparison with our European neighbours. On the other hand, perhaps he prefers the example of some US states where very low taxes mean that a vast underclass is cut off from the rest of society and dealt with only through the imposition of force. In that society the ostentatious wealth of the richest nation in the world rests uneasily cheek-by-jowl with Third World levels of poverty and, not surprisingly, an unstoppable level of violent crime. - Yours, etc., Tom Geraghty,
Assistant General Secretary, Public Service Executive Union, Merrion Square, Dublin 2.