The Secretary General, under disproportionate pressure over a yet-to-be-announced deficit of 400,000 to 700,000 Euro, resigned too. The resignations were treated in the press as part of a pre-arranged process but in fact the Chairman had recently been re-appointed; and the tenure of both the Chairman and Secretary General had a significant time to run. Neither would have resigned had a crisis not arisen. In an apparently unrelated move, Judge Rory McCabe resigned. Since our last edition, the organisation has decided to make four out of 20 staff working on the domestic side – including the critically important head of its highly-regarded community services – compulsorily redundant. Other staff may suffer pay cuts and disimprovements in working conditions, though Unions are resisting them, with some success. Meanwhile, the controlling executive committee members led by Tony Lawlor and Des Kavanagh remain in place.

In our October article we drew attention to the Sisyphean reform process whereby – just before a report recommending rotation of the executive committee is published – the Secretary General moves on; and the process has to be re-instigated. A report on reform was produced in November for a meeting of the central council. The council itself would become a “General Assembly” and crucially its membership could only serve two successive three-year terms before being required to retire for a year. Sources told Village the danger with this is that it was a mandate for calcified existing members of the central council to sit out another six years on the new General Assembly. This would be unhealthy.

A climate of fear and of distrust between staff and the Executive Committee prevails, partly because of the mystery surrounding the resignations of a number of Secretaries General; and partly because in the past, where details of poor governance have been leaked to the media, key staff have been combatively interrogated about it. T

he IRCS benefits from extraordinary public goodwill. Over €600,000 has already been raised for flood response with expectations of another €400,000.

In the Dail on 8 December Brian O’Shea TD asked Willie O’Dea, the Minister for Defence, if he had satisfied himself that the IRCS had in place specific plans and structures to expeditiously and economically deploy the large sums of money being collected to deal with the recent floods. The Minister said it did.

Nevertheless, despite denials by the Minister and by the IRCS itself – for example on TV3’s afternoon programme at the beginning of December – where a specific pledge was given that funds would be disbursed within 48 hours, specific plans were not in place ten days later (three weeks after the first floods) – a long time in disaster relief. In the case of previous floods in Ireland the IRCS simply administered a government-funded scheme.

In the case of the recent floods, however, the IRCS has solicited funds for itself for redistribution. In Mid-December the Irish Red Cross started accepting applications from people in need of financial assistance. It published ads saying applicants would not be means-tested but that an assessment process would be carried out to determine beneficiaries and amounts. It said payments from the fund will be considered independently of any compensation or assistance people might get. This would seem on the face of it to undermine the basis of needs-based relief. It augurs badly for the process.

The central issue is that key members of the executive committee are more interested in first aid and in purchasing ambulances than in domestic and overseas relief efforts. Ambulances have cost up to €1m annually in recent years – €400,000 in the last year – and have often been subsidised, sometimes even insisted upon, by central government including by its Galway-based Minister, Eamon O’ Cuív. Ambulances had for some time before its recent liquidation been bought without the benefit of any proper competitive tendering process from Tom Hogan Motors in Galway. Mr Hogan is a friend of Des Kavanagh, former IRCS Treasurer, though there is no reason to think that the friendship did anything other than work to the advantage of the IRCS.

The Irish Red Cross, worthy as it is and despite so many excellent volunteers on the ground, unrivalled public goodwill and the beginnings of institutional reform, has a long way to travel to fulfil the mandate and the reputational premium it enjoys in Ireland.

As I write this in early December, many of the world’s newspapers are leading with the extraordinary achievements of a group of remarkable women.   Okay, so the celebrated achievements of Rachel Uchitel, Jaimee Grubbs, Kalika Moquin and perhaps other improbably-named “birdies” (har-de-har) are to do with their alleged capacity to engage in sexual activities with Tiger Woods.  Liberation has got to start somewhere.  The prominence enjoyed by this bevy of beauties (and more power to them) is a consequence of the media’s ever-ready shock (shock!) at the fact that a very attractive and rich person, brimming with competitive ego, and constantly travelling the world, would have sex with people other than the lawfully married spouse.
If ever a story should qualify as non-news under the rubric of dog-bites-man, it’s this one.  Notwithstanding the golfer’s own “transgressions”-speak, nonsense about the sanctity of marriage or about the special sanctity of this particular celebrity marriage can be dismissed out of hand as an excuse for covering this story the way ice used to cover the North Pole.  Nope, we all know Woods’ behaviour is predictable and, frankly, commonplace.  We read and talk about it precisely because it’s a nasty piece of privacy-invading gossip.  No decent newspaper would go near it.  Luckily for our baser natures, there is no such thing as a decent newspaper; the Irish Times put it on page 1.
As several commentators have pointed out in the midst of the continuing national argument about the economy, one situation in which women are slightly more likely than average to get a fair shake for reasons other than their genital connections is when they work in the public sector.  This is one of the countless reasons to reject the prevailing orthodoxy that suggests public-sector workers have had it too good in this country.  There is a strong argument, on the other hand, that they (we – I lecture for a living in a publicly funded third-level institute) have had it good.  I didn’t think much of the benchmarking lark when it was first introduced, but after a few years I came to address benchmarking with a polite tip of the hat and thanks from me and all the family.
But “too good”? The concept is admissible only in a pragmatic sense; did public-servants’ relative good fortune do serious damage to this society? It’s very hard to argue that they did – not when the spectacle of Anglo Irish Bank is there to remind what a real menace to society looks like, a menace that is still employing people on six-figure salaries to try not to do any more harm, at a cost of billions to the Exchequer.  No, the complaints against public servants that rang through 2009 had a tone of moral-outrage, a way of lashing out at a different sort of promiscuous Tiger, rather than containing any practical analysis.  Why should they (we) have secure jobs, half-decent pensions, reasonable holidays, unions to look after them…? The question, of course, should be: why shouldn’t everyone have these things? There should be no moral superiority about being exploited more than your neighbour.
The campaign against public servants comes, of course, at a time when many in the private sector feel fortunate to be exploited by an employer as opposed to queuing for the dole.  But the crisis shall pass, eventually, and workers in all sectors must resist our very own Shock Doctrine, the use of crisis to roll back the gains made by workers over decades, not only in our wages and conditions but in the provision of public services (admittedly pretty crummy public-service gains in Ireland, poster-isle for neo-liberalism).
Ah, but what about “competitiveness”? The bland acceptance of this word’s applicability to this crisis, usually preceded by “restore”, has been one of the great achievements of the Shock Doctrinaires.  And it is a nonsense, firstly because it should have little relevance to public services, we don’t pay our nurses a salary that will make them employable by, say, the Estonian health system; we are not (yet) in the position where we are flogging our civil service on the world market.  The fact that our wages are high compared to other EU states is not surprising; most things are more expensive here.
But shouldn’t we be cutting salaries across the economy, with public-sector workers setting a good example, so that we can “competitively” sell our private-sector goods and services abroad? Well, believe it or not, we’re doing just fine with that.  In the midst of the greatest global economic crisis in decades, Irish exports rose by 4 per cent to June of this year.  In December we learned that Irish manufacturing output had risen.  And remember, that’s without any evidence of substantial cuts in private-sector wages.  Google Michael Burke’s article, “Ireland: The Nature of the Crisis”, Socialist Economic Bulletin for a detailed, rigorous and eye-opening explanation of what we’ve been going through.  The “competitiveness” narrative is, as Burke writes, “a misjudgment, at least”.  But don’t expect to read that sort of sober analysis in Irish newspapers, which, even as they die out, are still very much in the business of delivering all sorts of shocks.  We are literally the poorer for it.