OPINION/Kathy Sheridan: Who or what are the "middle classes"? It's a handy label to be sure, thrown out with airy insouciance by politicians or commentators sharpening an axe. By talking tough about the "middle classes", they can sound like the good guys with a social conscience, while fudging the precise targets.
Thus, bon vivant lawyers who moan about writing €56,000 for their pension funds slot into the same pigeon-hole as a middle manager who can just about scrape together the €1,300 for the VHI by reducing his Chinese take-aways to one a month.
But do labels matter? They can. Apart from the fact that the "middle class" brand has assumed pejorative overtones, a catch-all for everything that is whingeing, grasping and inequitable about this country, it has acquired a swathe of new members - university students and, by extension, their parents.
This is because the abolition of university fees in 1994 was nothing more than "a gift to the middle classes", we're told, awarded at the expense of the disadvantaged.
So anyone who put a child through third-level education in recent years must live with the knowledge that the dustman subsidised it. And having acquired that privileged education, the child will go on to earn 83 per cent more in her privileged lifetime than the dustman's child (who probably got only a Leaving Cert, if that).
In short, the dustman subsidises the doctor. And if that thought doesn't mortify you, goes the message, then the Tiger surely ate your conscience. Thus, the "middle classes" have been softened up and the groundwork laid for some type of third-level levy, via fees, graduate taxes or student loans. Any of these would impose heavy financial constraints at some point. Fees, for example, would entail serious after-tax sums of money up front for any normal household - €3/4/5,000 a year depending on who you read. Yet the true objective of the charges is as clear as mud.
The Minister for Finance nods admiringly at Noel Dempsey for having the "courage" to wheel out the fees spectre, as he chooses between cutbacks. UCD president Dr Art Cosgrave points to cuts in university funding next year and wonders how the shortfall is to be met in the absence of fees. All of which suggests that we're talking cost-saving measures, yes? No, says Noel Dempsey. He insists that the fees debate has nothing whatever to do with Exchequer savings and everything to do with wider access to third level.
The one certainty is that the third-level system needs the money and that it has to come from somewhere. But it's hardly good enough simply to say that free fees failed to create wider access and that middle-class beneficiaries should pay up.
Everyone knows that education disadvantage sets in long, long before the college years. Clearly, there have been massive policy failures all the way along, right through the system. What were these and what has been done about them? Is third-level education necessarily for everyone?
Properly informed and fuelled with honesty, this could become a productive debate. During the Nice campaign, one senior Fianna Fáil figure found that the fees threat was the biggest anti-Government issue. But because of how the arguments had been framed, it was about more than money, a man on one modest doorstep said.
If people who have not been to university cannot be expected to contribute to third-level education, then why should childless couples pay taxes for schools? Or Kerry people pay for the DART? Or prudent folk who started a pension fund at 25 stump up for those who couldn't be bothered? And anyway, if people were taxed according to their true means - "and I include the so-called working classes in that" - fees would not be an issue, he added.
At another door, a countrywoman marvelled at the perception that educating a child through third level was the easy option.
NO child effortlessly magics up a heroic accumulation of points in the Leaving Cert. Nor does everyone live on the DART line, she noted acidly, allowing students to live at home. Keeping her son in a Dublin university, in food, rent, transport and books, was costing them an already-taxed €8,000 a year. A second son may "go up" next year. Even with a "respectable combined gross income of about €60,000 in the house", as she put it, they have to be ferociously disciplined.
Noel Dempsey is alert to nuances. He acknowledges that there are "some middle-class people who do not qualify for (college) maintenance grants and they would not be among the rich of Ireland". So despite the easy labelling, not all middle-class people are in his sights. (Other politicians and commentators, please copy.)
But at whom, then, is he aiming his kite? That would be people on salaries like his own and higher, he told our Education Editor. If so, that certainly sorts the middle classes from the middling-wealthy classes. Between the ministerial salary (around €160,000 plus benchmarking increase), chauffeur-driven Mercedes (exempt from benefit-in-kind tax), generous expenses, and the grand little tax break on a Dublin home for Cabinet out-of-towners (worth about €50,000 over four years), our ministers pull in over €200,000 a year.
By that reckoning, the bulk of the middle classes can relax. But who will deny the force of Noel Dempsey's argument? Access is the issue - and it begins the day a child is born. Now you're talking real money . . .