It’d be nice to feel positive and upbeat, given the season that’s in it. Christmas is coming after all. ‘Tis the season to be jolly and all of that. By the time you’re reading this we might all be walking in a winter wonderland. But it is hard to get excited about the prospect of sleighbells in the snow or rocking around the Christmas tree even, in a country where the fat cats continue to steal the cream and ordinary people are going hungry.
I have no problem with people making money. Your album sells 10 million copies? Hallelujah! You create an app that the world loves? Wonderful. You write a song that wins an Academy Award. Love it. Your restaurant captures the zeitgeist and does a roaring trade. Hip, hip, horray. You sign for Arsenal or Liverpool or better still Barcelona. I’m with you all the way. These are ‘life is good’ moments, when someone falls on their feet rather than being browbeaten onto their knees. You get lucky, and win the Lotto? Fair play to you. Cheers.
In the same spirit, we know that some people are better paid than others. That’s inevitable. Within reason, it is necessary and appropriate. You take a lot of responsibility on, then it is logical that this should be rewarded. You work longer hours? Ditto. You develop a very high level of expertise in matters of life and death? Fine. No one would dispute that a heart surgeon deserves a decent stipend for getting to the point where he or she is good enough at the gig to save other people’s lives. Because we also know that there is a price to be paid for failure: a heart surgeon who messes up more than once is not going to see people forming an orderly queue for their services...
But none of that is a justification for a culture in which some people are grossly overpaid for what they do, while others are left desperately in need – which is the way it has been in Ireland for a long time now. We all know about the obscene amounts of money that were – and indeed in certain instances still are – being paid to staff at the top of the Irish banking pyramid. Well, it is also true that when the economy was in the process of being inflated, an elite of public servants – including politicians – were also accorded salary increases which were absurdly disproportionate. The net effect is that members of a small upper crust get rich pickings, which everyone else has to fund, out of diminishing resources.
It gets worse, however. It has emerged over the past two weeks that the official salaries paid to numerous people in the health sector do not in fact tell the whole story, with senior hospital executives frequently receiving what are called ‘top-up’ payments. In particular, as revealed by the independent TD Shane Ross, senior executives at the Central Remedial Clinic were being given additional payments, apparently in breach of the Public Service guidelines, set down by the Government. The Central Remedial Clinic is funded by the State, through the HSE, to the tune of €19 million a year, with additional cash being donated to it, as a charity, by members of the public. Officially, the former Chief Executive of the CRC, Paul Kiely, received a salary of €106,000. However, Shane Ross uncovered the fact that, before his retirement last year, Kiely was also receiving a so-called top-up of an astonishing €136,000 per annum. The ‘top-up’ – bigger than his base salary – was funded directly from donations made by the public, through a lottery, to a company called Friends and Supporters of the Central Remedial Clinic.
On the face of it, this looks like a serious breach of trust by whoever authorised it: would members of the public have contributed if they knew that their money was being used in this way? Almost certainly not.
There were further revelations. In addition to top-ups, it was noted in the accounts of Friends and Supporters of the Central Remedial Clinic that €3 million had been lent to bolster the private pension funds of Paul Kiely and other executives of the CRC. This in turn begs another question. Is the former Chief Executive’s pension based on the €242,000 that he was paid in his final year in the job?
I don’t like personalising these things. I have no axe to grind with Paul Kiely or indeed with any of the members of the board of the Central Remedial Clinic. But there can be no escaping the fact that, individually and collectively, they have questions to answer. One of the board members, former Fianna Fáil TD, Vincent Brady, dismissed the criticisms of the CRC as politically motivated but also insisted that he had not known about the top-ups and that they had not been sanctioned by the Board. There is no reason to disbelieve him in relation to this. But you then have to ask: surely as a board member he should know, from examining the accounts, who was being paid what, and how? And surely he should make it his business also to know how the charitable donations to the ‘Friends and Supporters of the Central Remedial Clinic’ were being used. Since then, the Board has issued a statement, which is in direct conflict with the HSE's version of events.
€3 million that should have been used to help people with disabilities instead put into a pension fund: this may have been suggested by their pension advisers, but it still looks bad. Top-up payments of 136k a year to one individual when every last cent is being screwed out of ordinary working people to support the health service? That looks bad too.
Let’s forget about the individuals involved. And let’s pass discreetly over the long-standing close links some of them enjoyed with the former Taoisech Bertie Ahern. What is depressing here is the fact that greed and cynicism seem to have taken such strong roots in what Eamon Dunphy calls Official Ireland.
Which is why I’m not exactly feeling in the festive mood. “Let the music keep our spirits high,” Jackson Browne sang in ‘Before The Deluge’. Well, we’ll try. Let’s stick on Brenda Lee again and imagine the scene: everyone dancing merrily in the new old fashioned way. Next up Tom Waits and the wonderful ‘Christmas Card From A Hooker in Minneapolis’. “Hey Charlie," I hear Tom growl, “I think about you every time I pass a fillin’ station/ Account of all the grease you used to wear in your hair/ Still have that record, little Anthony and The Imperials/ Someone stole my record player... now how do you like that?”
It’s been that kind of year alright. Happy Christmas everyone...