Madam, – In his article of (Opinion, August 4th), Tom Geraghty suggests Jim O’Leary, Garret FitzGerald and I have contributed to the spreading of a “myth” that public servants enjoy a pay premium on average relative to their private sector counterparts.
While I cannot speak for Mr O’Leary and Dr FitzGerald, I do want to point out that my comments on this issue are based on work undertaken by my colleagues at the ESRI, Dr Elish Kelly, Dr Séamus McGuinness and Dr Philip O’Connell. The method they apply to measuring the public/private pay gap has been used extensively by both economists and sociologists internationally to study pay differences between public sector and private sectors workers. The same method has also been applied to measuring the pay gap between blacks and whites, males and females, immigrants and natives, union members and non-union members, and in many more situations besides. The international scientific journals contain many of these studies.
Studies conducted by myself and colleagues at the ESRI on the gender pay gap and the immigrant/native pay gap using this standard method have generally been accepted by groups, including the trade unions, as providing reliable measurement of these important sources of inequity.
Rather than spreading myths, I see my comments on the issue of pay as bringing well-researched evidence to the debate. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Regarding the McCarthy report recommendation to abolish the Family Support Agency (FSA) and its functions. We are deeply concerned at the possible abolition of the FSA and the services dependant on its support. While recognising the dire economic circumstances facing the country and Government, we believe a cursory analysis of the FSA expenditure on family-oriented counselling agencies demonstrates the exceptional value-for-money and cost efficiencies of the system of grants operated.
The purpose of the FSA is to advance the Government’s commitment to supporting family life as espoused in the Constitution. This commitment is realised through the development of necessary support services, of which the counselling sector is one. The value for money of counselling services delivered under the grants scheme is remarkable by any standards. The cost-per-intervention to the State is at least 10 times less than if the State were to provide these services directly.
This is achieved because all of the agencies supported by grant aid more than match these funds, by providing buildings, administration, secretarial, and supervisory systems. All grant monies are invested directly in service provision.
We live in a time where social meaning and social values are mediated more and more by economics and law. However, we would passionately argue for the need to evaluate what we need as a society in terms of family well-being. We measure this surely by the degree to which our State exercises the virtues of human care and compassion for families experiencing hardship, anguish, and adversity.
We make a plea for supporting the concept of a “compassion fingerprint” that measures the evidence of how much compassion we show to the emotionally distressed in our society. Our current partnership, facilitated by the FSA, allows for the low-cost provision of supports for families in need and leaves the fingerprint of this compassion on countless rural and urban families in every county.
As the economic status of families gets hit, our services will be all the more critical, particularly as they are low-cost and are countrywide.
Physical illness will always secure funding because in its visibility it is obvious. Not so with the hidden abuse of a child, the heartbreak of bereavement, the anguish of family breakdown, the loneliness of a single parent, or the stress, anxiety, and depression that hangs like an invisible shroud around a family. The FSA and our organisations have sought to bring these realities into the priorities and vision of our society without fuss or fanfare.
Voluntary not-for-profit organisations have always been part of the fabric of Irish social, family and community support. It has taken, in many instances, the last 40 years to build up not just agencies, but the will, vision, and charitable dimension to this work. We believe that the recommendations in the report would shatter the scaffolding of human resources, good will, and progress that have been made over many decades.
We in Ireland have a unique history of social and community volunteerism that is unparalleled in the US and Europe. The work of the FSA in regularising, supporting, consolidating, and improving these services has been remarkable and it would be tragic, we believe, to dismantle this effort and the stream of funding which it provides to our sector.
Banks have been guaranteed various financial supports in order to enable continuity, confidence, and trading. On behalf of the more that 25,000 people served by our agencies per annum, we are hopeful of some form of social guarantee for agencies serving families in distress. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – As recent events have shown, property values are both unpredictable and indicative of a house’s location rather than the level of demand placed upon local services. Wouldn’t the best method of taxing property be on the basis of the floor area of a dwelling? – Yours, etc,