Tony O'Reilly's Comfortable Cabals

national | arts and media | opinion/analysis Thursday March 23, 2006 03:30 by hackwatch

Who is this comfortable cabal holding the country to ransom?

To see the ideological bias of the Irish media, the treatment of the trade unions by our tribe of opinion writers is probably as good a place as any to start. If one was so foolish as to believe that the national media's commentators presented a reasonably accurate range of the opinions held by the population then you would probably come to the conclusion that trade unions were some sort of masonic conspiracy, made up of "pampered dinosaurs" who regularly "hold the country to ransom" and never cease to threaten our poor down-trodden consumers with their refusal to "embrace change".

The Sunday papers are traditionally the place where pundits are given most license to vent their spleen against this sinister trade union conspiracy. Thus last weekend saw several commentators cranking out the full range of stereotyped anti-union abuse. Both Ailis O'Hanlon in the Sunday Independent and Richard Delevan in the Sunday Tribune selected the long standing problems with our driving test system as a stick with which to beat the unions, while the Tribune’s editorial boldly declared in its headline that “trade unions stand in the way of the common good”.

Waiting lists for driving tests are unacceptably long and nobody denies this. In 2003 the backlog was cut to 10 weeks after testers agreed to productivity improvements. Subsequently the government finally passed legislation aiming to regularise the situation of the 400,000 drivers who drive our roads without having passed the driving test. Naturally enough, in the absence of sufficient extra resources for testers, this put a strain on the system and the average waiting time for driving tests increased to over 10 months. Far from resisting all changes, IMPACT, the trade union involved, proposed several changes which could have delivered this increased capacity, including an end to the cap on temporary driving testers (the department of finance would only fund the employment of 10 of the 2,000 eligible applicants who replied to advertisements last August). IMPACT have also supported the bonus scheme which has delivered an average of 1,170 extra tests a week since February 2006 - although they complain that the scheme was ready to roll in May 2005 and was held up due to the government's attempts to outsource the service despite the fact that the partnership deal that they agreed with the unions did not allow them to do this - as found by the civil service arbitration board last week.

Eilis O'Hanlon has a somewhat simpler take on the whole matter. The "comfortable cabal" that make up the unions have "spent decades resisting change" and that's all that we need to know to blame them for the problem. O'Hanlon proceeds into rhetorical overdrive in her denunciations of these "precious brothers who never created a single job or a single cent in Ireland". So, if the hundreds of thousands of trade unionists in the country decided not to show up to work every day, this apparently wouldn't affect the generation of wealth in the economy? An unusual economic theory to say the least.

Meanwhile Colm McCarthy, writing in the Sunday Independent, used opposition to privatisation among Aer Lingus workers as his stick of choice to attack the 'troglodyte' trade unions, bizarrely insinuating that this was somehow connected to the former Soviet Union.

Although I haven't canvassed them individually, I'd be willing to bet that the opposition to privatisation in Aer Lingus is not driven by the desire for Bertie to recreate the Soviet Union’s command economy. A quick glance at the pay and conditions that their colleagues enjoy in the private hands of Michael O'Leary's anti-union Ryanair should be enough for anybody to understand their position. Very few people who work for profitable companies (Aer Lingus made €72 million last year) which help fund the exchequer while providing thousands of relatively decent jobs are going to be particularly keen to “embrace” a change which is likely to see them working harder for less money, with the profits going into the pockets of very rich people.

Although the ideological anti-union position is common in our media, it is not shared by the consumers whom the pundits claim to champion. Some 35% of the workforce are members of a union and a recent study published by John Geary, associate professor of industrial relations and human resources at UCD, found that pro-union sentiment in Ireland would translate into a union density of 71% of the workforce. Now the vast majority of the population (or consumers as they are known to the right) depend upon wages for their living, so it's safe to say that a large majority of the population disagree fundamentally with the pundits.

Rather than being accurate representations of the views of “consumers”, these hysterical anti-union views are much closer to the positions of the employers, people like Tony O'Reilly, head honcho at Independent Newspapers, who has frequently had problems with employees resisting those changes which are aimed at boosting his profits. O’Reilly is also a man who has first hand experience of the huge windfalls that privatisation can deliver to the wealthy. He pocketed a tidy €60 million profit from Eircom. It takes a special type of servile intellect to present the union side of this debate as being the comfortable cabal holding the country to ransom.

Sunday Independent Calls Eoin Harris a “Loonie Leftie”

Sunday Independent journalists would appear to have little discrimination when choosing pretexts with which to attack their enemies. In their edition of March 19th, page 36 saw Eoin McMahon attacking Newstalk’s Ger Gilroy and Eamon Dunphy as well as Village editor Vincent Browne. The mere fact that these journalistss had suggested a liberalisation of drug laws as a way to tackle the criminality associated with illegal drug use was enough to label them as the “loony left” with “barking” solutions.

Flick back a few pages to page 29 where, while making extraordinarily tenuous attempts to link the provos to the existence of criminality, Eoin Harris makes a lengthy case in favour of decriminalisation of drugs. Amusingly, this commentator (who is presumably now a fully paid up member of the loony left on account of his drug-liberalising stance) tells us at length about the “long farewell letter to socialism” that he penned back in 1969. I don’t know what they’ve been smoking down on Abbey Street, but they seem a tad confused.