Totally off-topic:
Census 2006: Age 0-14 864,449
Age 15-24 632,732
So roughly 448,000 primary age children. INTO is I believe primary school teachers… which gives an average of about 15 per class.
I thought we had the largest class sizes in Europe?
personally i think the people responsible for this mess should be suffering more, and yet we had that banker talking about taking home a €2,000,000 salary as part of a pay cut. objectively, there may be a point here, though no doubt this will descend into a Public/Private sector debate again while these people laugh at us all.
The reality is even if we took all the people “responsible” and cut their pay to €0 it would make no difference to the hole in the public finances.
sharper, i’m not saying that there shouldn’t be PS cuts, my point is that there should be some impact on the wages of mega-earners in sectors such as banking, if they arent going to sack the feckers, and i think if PS workers make this point strongly enough, maybe it might happen. i doubt it though.
edit: an example of the inequity is that developers stop paying interest on their loans while joe soap doesn’t have this “choice.”
If their pay was cut to €0 it would leave a bigger hole in the public finances. Each Mill lost in pay is 400k odd lost to the gov (the notion that every higher income taxpayer pays no tax is a bit of a myth). That is the problem as I can assure you that most high incomes are declining.
So anyone annoyed now, wait till the tax base is broadened next year to make a bit up for the lost tax revenues from the high earners and the 150k mere mortal souls that have been made redundant.
no no no! sure half of them are working in the Dail and cant be teaching at the same time
Yes but at least justice will have seen to be done instead of putting the boot into the easiest target.
i see your logic now. let’s just give the bankers a raise so, that should pay for those cervical cancer vaccines, no? 
I will lock if this turns into a pointless Private vs Public shindig . We have had enough of these in recent months on the Pin .
Roll the eyes all you want. I was simply expressing reality.
On another note, why should everyone who earns a high salary be deemed “responsible” for the crisis?
Justice should/must be done (and feck this “seen to be done” shite) in due course however it’s a separate issue to the public finances.
People are connecting the two in an irrational manner and perceiving the pension levy/cutbacks/tax increases as “punishments” while “those responsible” are “not punished”.
Just wait till the teachers see 2010 and 2011, they’ll be striking for a return to 2009 pay levels.
I won’t bore everyone with that quote about the bank being in trouble when you owe them €100m.
When you have lots of money your relationship with the bank is fundamentally different. You get a personalised service and the rules that apply to others do not apply to you. Unfair perhaps but that’s the way the banks operate. When your business represents 5% of the bank’s revenue you can make demands that someone whose business represents 0.000001% cannot.
I think it’s unlikely that developers get to stop paying interest on their loans by the way - the interest may be getting rolled into the total sum but that’s another disaster waiting to hit the markets.
what do you mean by this? i haven’t made this point at all.
my initial point was in reference to bankers earning large sums of money whose lending criterion has been (by their own admission) flawed in recent years. by all means if a firm is doing well pay a high salary, but in the case of the culpable there must be consequences.
i have never said that high salaries are wrong in themselves, just in the example outlined…
Ok sorry. But how would you determine who is responsible and how would you ensure that
? V. curious.
for me responsibility lies with govt for tax breaks that incentivised bubble, banks for lending recklessly, rising cost of living that resulted from massive bonuses and payouts, benchmarking as a result of cost of living rises, general psychosis that resulted in the statement “my house is my pension.”
to make the people responsible suffer more i’d recommend cap on banker salaries, imprisonment for white-collar fraud, large share capital of banks in public hands in return for bailout, bankruptcy of developers who are not repaying loans, and in order to balance books PS cuts, minimum wage cut, increase in income tax, social welfare cut.
but hey, the first few wont happen while the latter will.
The property sections of the banks are, tbh, getting smaller. Would you recommend capping a leasing senior managers salary who had nothing to do with property?
Have to change the law to jail the white collar fraudsters.
Point No 3 agreed. If you like craps, bank shares offer generous odds offered by the house.
Point No 4 will happen. As night follows day. Bankers are just terribly slow at taking security.
PS cuts & IT increase yes but dont think social welfare cut (ie the essential ones, not the extra 1k un-means tested grant for kids etc.)
Well I just spent the evening speaking with a man who spent 40 years of his life attempting to educate children from North Clondalkin at a time when many of his contemporaries were lining their pockets. Not only did he act as educater but he also acted as a quasi-social worker 24 hours a day 7 days a week, had a gun put to his head on one occasion and averted a number of attempted suicides on others.
This man is well aware of the double standards that exist within Dáil Eireann when it comes to the actions of former teachers vis a vis the drawing of Pensions etc, but surely the Pin is capable of drawing a distinction between “teachers” per se and the likes of the incumbents of Dáil Éireann.
Seriously folks, less of the Division please, you’re either part of the problem in engaging in it or you’re being manipulated by an obliging media.
Which is it??
Teachers in Greece went on strike recently. New graduate teachers there get 14k and much worse pension entitlement. Newly qualified teachers in France get around 19k. Irish newly qualified get over 32k. Our public sector workers are entitled to no more than the EU average as we are no more than an aaverage member of eurozone now and we CANT afford to disadvantage rest of our economy by paying our public sector the best pay/pension packages in the Eurozone.
And how much does a home in Greece cost?
How much does a beer cost in Greece?
How much does rent cost in Greece?
How much does a loaf of bread or milk cost in Greece?
Wake up man - its all connected - greed is what has us where we are. Its not exclusive to any section of our society so the less of the scapegoating we engage in the better.
The Irish have become greedy bastards. And thats what has us where we are. Deal with it.