The weather in Ireland this week has been nothing short of atrocious. Hurricane strength winds and rain swept the country with devastating consequences for homes and businesses, particularly in the southwest. Towns like Fermoy, Mallow and Clonmel experienced massive flooding in the centre of their towns and emergency services were called in to assist with the rescue of people and possessions. These low lying-areas have of course seen it all before and suffer again because remedial measures have never been put in place.

Further east the damage was much less, as the west and south had broken the back of the storms as they traveled across the country. Nonetheless, it was a far from pleasant week for anybody living in Ireland. It was certainly not a week to be on an Ireland vacation, although Ireland travel sources say there are many tourists in the country at this time of year, amazingly.
Despite the storms we were smiling, come Thursday last. We state this fact whilst having the greatest of sympathy with those unfortunate people who suffered the effects of the storms. The reason for our display of mirth was the publication of the Benchmarking Review of Pay for public service workers. Regular readers will be familiar with our contempt of the working practices and pay scales of public service employees, not to mention the fact that there are about three times as many employed in this sector as there should be.

The last review in 2002, called the Benchmarking Process, awarded scandalous pay and pension increases across the whole range of workers, managers and pay scales leading to the now infamous comments by Senator Joe O’Toole, then president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, that benchmarking was like taking money from ATM’s. His own union, the INTO, representing national school teachers, had benefited enormously from the process which compared and measured pay across the whole range of the public services against those in the private sector, and benchmarked one against the other, resulting in a cost to the taxpayer of well over a billion euro! Soothing sounds made at the time by the unions said this all linked to increased productivity and output. This laughable comment was from the very people whose only output was difficult to measure, as it was generally delivered into a toilet bowl! O’Toole could not contain himself, boasting to his own annual conference about the great deal he had engineered, and stupidly alienating the public support that was always there for teachers, nurses, care workers etc. » Read more: The Day The ATM Stopped Working