TALKBACK:The most vulnerable pay the price of huge salaries, writes BRIAN MOONEY

HAVE YOU NOTICED how quiet our workplaces have become as the level of fear about our future has built up over the past year or so? In such an atmosphere of fear and apprehension the calls to slash public-service spending on education, health and social welfare is bound to find a receptive audience.

It cannot be long before we begin to see the emergence of individuals and interest groups keen to decimate our current spending programmes, targeting areas such as educational disadvantage, special-needs education, and integration programmes for our recent immigrants.

Right-wing parties throughout Europe and the Tea Party movement in the US are pushing this agenda. It is an agenda that, if implemented in Ireland, could roll back the advances in education and social services made in the past two decades. So how should teachers and educationalists working in the public sector respond?

I am sure I speak for most teachers and other public servants when I say that I am prepared to co-operate fully with the efficiency measures of the Croke Park deal on public service reform. It is a small price to pay to preserve social harmony.

We must make our own effort against a background of national economic crisis.

When I make the case for co-operation with the Croke Park measures to fellow teachers and other public servants I am inevitably met with an acceptance of the basic validity of my argument but also with a sense of huge resentment about those in public-service employment, including some in the education sector, who are being paid obscenely large amounts of money.

How can politicians expect public servants on modest incomes to make painful sacrifices when they see the likes of Dr Jim McDaid walk away with a pension package of up to €250,000 in his first year of retirement? How many special-needs assistants and language-support teachers would that pay for?

I have called in the past for a salary cap of €100,000 for all public servants, including politicians.

The exorbitant salaries of senior education figures, revealed in The Irish Times last week, are truly shocking at a time when the most vulnerable people in our education sector face savage cuts.

Now is the time for leadership. The remuneration all those paid from the public purse, including those within the education sector, should be brought back to sensible levels. The Government must take a lead in cutting top salaries and confronting the elite groups in education and other sectors who are overpaid.

We can’t formulate our four-year recovery plan on the backs of our most vulnerable children and adults. The high rollers in education and in the rest of the public service should be the first to take the pain of the cuts.

Brian Mooney is a former president of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors