Yesterday’s strikes and day of shopping to Newry posed some interesting questions. Who exactly were the Newry shoppers? ICTU president Peter McLoone denied on the six one news and on prime time that any public sector workers were up shopping in Newry and were on the picket lines, doing their duty, standing up for their right to say no more. According to McLoone, public sector workers have already taken a seven percent pay cut which is absolute rubbish and the Sunday Business Post explained this last February. The public sector unions are really starting to annoy me and I hope the government takes an axe to the public sector pay and public sector numbers in the next budget. The reason I hope this is because of idiots like Peter McLoone who act like ostriches in the sand and deny the facts that are as clear as day for all to see. A pension levy applied or pension contribution on your income might be new to the public sector but for those of us who work in the private sector, pension contributions of 4 or 5 or 6% plus AVC contributions on top of that are nothing new. What do we get in return? We get lovely pension funds depleted by a third because of stock market crashes. We get no guaranteed pension on retirement. But, this pension levy and the income levy are already too harsh according to McLoone, his workers have already taken a 7% pay cut and will take no more. Does McLoone think that the private sector doesn’t contribute to it’s own pensions and does he think the other income levies are not applied to the private sector as equally as they are applied to the public sector? When talking about rates of pay, Jim Power cited the difference of 20% in public sector pay and private sector pay as researched by the ERSI and the CSO, McLoone rubbished the statistics and basically asserted that Jim Power was making them up. What planet does this man come from? Rubbishing ESRI and CSO statistics isn’t exactly going to win you any support is it? Nor is planning another strike less than a week after the first strike. McLoone defended the heart and soul of the public sector who have “done so much for this country” and cited examples of his workers in places like Galway who given the flood emergency hadn’t gone out on strike. Wow. What a concession. Decide not to strike in an emergency situation. In other places like Athlone, they did go on strike and the Army helped with the situation as the Army never strikes. As for the “they have done so much for this country”, what exactly have these public sector workers done that they haven’t been rewarded for? Does a clerical worker in a Government office do more honest work than a clerical worker in the private sector? Do they contribute more to the country? Do they work on a volunteer basis for no pay? If the public sector was so happy to ride the benchmarking wagon at the height of the boom and take all the pay increases, then they should be happy to ride the pay cut wagon that is necessitated by falling government revenues, a recession and lower costs of living. I am so sick of the whingers, the people demanding their walfare payments don’t get touched, and most recently, people demanding their pay dosen’t get cut whilst simultaneously blowing wads of cash in Newry for the Christmas shopping. No pay cuts, despite job security is their line. Neither the social welfare moaners nor the public sector workers can have their cake and eat it. They can choose pay cuts, welfare cuts, or they can choose phasing out of benefits completely along with job cuts in the public sector. It’s pretty obvious that reduced pay is a better option than the dole queue. It’s pretty obvious that reduced dole payments, pension payments and children’s allowance payments are a better option than certain allowances disappearing altogether like a fuel allowance or back to school allowance. To all the ostriches out there, 400 million a week in borrowings adds up to 20,800,000,000 a year. That is nearly 21 billion. To put that in context, NAMA is taking between 50 to 70 billion which, worst case scenario is roughly four years worth of borrowing. Taking a rough figure of public sector pay and welfare payments accounting for about 70% of the country’s budget means that maybe 15 billion a year in borrowings will go on paying people money. It those terms, the Government will run up the equivalent amount of worst case NAMA debt in five years if cuts are not made. NAMA is hopefully going to be a once off. The public and welfare sector bills will go on indefinitely. If the public sector and welfare demanders don’t wake up and smell the coffee, their demands will make a far bigger financial mess of this country than the banking crisis can ever hope to. That is a scary thought. So to all those picketers and all those demanding their benefits remain untouched, you are more damaging to this country than any toxic banker. Don’t forget, that Ireland is also paying the highest interest rate in Europe for borrowing money. Ireland will continue to do so if you don’t dampen down your demands. So, next time you walk onto a picket or state that you won’t be ably to buy milk for the babby or fuel for the fire consider what sort of country we will be living in a few years down the road if you don’t take your decreases on the chin in a deflating economy. No one likes pay cuts, but no one wants to live in a banana republic with no future either.