One's first instinct upon seeing the pay increases that AIB's top executives awarded themselves last year - £4.25 million between the five of them - is to reach out for one's pint and murmur softly: "****??!!" You can buy a lot of sardines for that kind of money, and it is of course tempting to declare that it is immoral that such men earn so many sardines - which is as useful as saying it is immoral that Saudi Arabia has so much oil and poor little Tanzania has none.
There is a market for oil and there is a market for managerial skills. If you haven't got either commodity, you haven't the ability to compete in either market. Capitalism is not a charity, not even for its senior managers. They might help themselves to disproportionate amounts of money in the short term; but in the long term, if they are not in jail, they are certainly out of work - not least because there are lots of tough and hungry people who want their jobs.
Zero-gravity world
Unless AIB has turned into a indoor relief agency for chaps with neat haircuts who speak American - and I don't believe it has - maybe its top execs really are worth that kind of money, somewhere or other in the marketplace. If AIB didn't pay them to deliver, someone else would. As always, the market commands - except, of course, in the zero-gravity world of the semi-States, where lunacy commands and idiocy triumphs at the expense of the taxpayer and the commuter.
Now tell me: which manager in the private sector has been watching the gathering crisis in CIE with mounting excitement, dreaming of that heaven-sent day when he - or even she - could take over the Balkans known as CIE, with its ridiculous pay, its grotesque under-capitalisation, its feuding tribes, its culture of incompetence and sloth, and, most of all, a resident pasha determined to have her say in all proceedings? The only one you'll find from the private sector is at present in a home for the bewildered, under the impression he is John D. Rockefeller.
With all his infirmities - that rather sad habit of wearing a lavatory seat around his shoulders and his insistence that nurses leave his presence backwards, bouncing their foreheads off the cell floor - he would probably do no worse a job than one of the AIB hotshots, or come to that, a coathanger, if either were in charge of CIE. It makes little difference. While the company - if that is not too cohesive a term to describe the rabble of local buses and national buses and local trains and national trains and DARTs and restaurants and property interests and, who knows, maybe even Sellafield (which certainly has every appearance of being run by CIE) - is driven by the commercial unrealities of a semi-State, what you get is the chaos of this week.
Ministerial interference
There is an equation here. Semi-State = ministerial interference. Politicians don't enter politics because they yearn to be a hermit on Rockall. Power is the purpose of politics. It is a powerful drug, always addictive and frequently hallucinogenic, giving its victims a wholly misplaced belief in their skills.
Now it is no coincidence that the most complex feature of any army, one which draws the most brilliant staff officers, is transport logistics. Politicians should be allowed to get their hands on that vital part of society much as children should be allowed to play with paraquat in a Club Orange bottle; yet it is the one commanding area of commercial life in Ireland in which ministerial interference is predominant. Is it surprising that when the crisis came, there was no chairman to handle it?
So goodbye Brian Joyce and hello John Lynch, you poor misfortunate. Whatever you're being paid, it's not enough: and while you have Boththy Bootths gazing over your shoulder, in no time at all you'll be looking longingly at the "officer-cleaner wanted" ads in the Kilbarrack Argus. The money might be less - not much less, though - but just think of the freedom! You even get to choose which window you clean first. Paradise.
And no, this is not a particular go at either of the Mary O'Rourkes who infest our media - there's a Ms O'Rourke, whom RTE with a laboured and sisterly sibilance terms Mzzzzzzz O'Rourke, and a there's a Mrs O'Rourke, and I've seen both creatures in the same story, so presumably there must be two of them - but a statement of simple economic and managerial truths. Transport companies must work to priorities which are incomprehensible to politicians. Managers must be free to manage as they see fit without Ministers dropping their rubber ducks and leaping from their baths every time they make a decision. And of course if anyone makes a joke about a Minister dropping her towel, the Minithter will cry, "Thexthithm! Thexthithm!"
A company which pays its senior managers badly costs its shareholders infinitely more than a company which pays its senior managers well. And as for a State company with a monopoly on transport and with a trade union movement with a monopoly over labour, you have the Haitian economic model: the triumph of intrusive governmental mismanagement and union tontonmacoutism that we witnessed this week.
It is an unusual demand that the power both of government and trade unions be severely curtailed. It's one that the commuters of Ireland should be making; but docile, long-suffering and eternally supine, of course they will not.