Dear Taoiseach 

You told us you had bottle .  What bottle?  Hard on the heels of your craven capitulation to Rome following the Murphy Report on the cover up of the mass rape of Irish Children comes news of your impending  capitulation to public sector unions.  What does it require for you to locate your famous bottle?  Does it require the threat of the resignation of your Minister for Finance or  will it require the arrival of IMF suits knocking on your bedroom doorearly some morning shuffling you off in your dressing gown and slippers to hand over the keys to Ireland’s economic independence?  This country is bankrupt mostly thanks to you and your old boss Bertie.  You didn’t stand up to them then and you’re not standing up to them now.  Instead you fedexcessive awards to a bloated public sector while hollowing out the income tax system. That was about the dumbest thing any sitting Minster for Finance could have done and you did it.  Now, faced with ruin, your response is to give them even more holidays!  Are you out of your mind?  

• The Comptroller and Auditor General reports a 50% increase in sickies since the 1980s in the civil service, arguably, the snuggest job in the public sector. 
• The average sickie over a year is 11 days and let’s talk plainly, most of these are paid holidays. 
• Just about 60% of all civil servants took sickies that’s right 6 out of every 10 ranging from 5.5 days in your own Department to 16 days in theProperty Registration Authority
• A whopping 42% of all absences were unauthorized and not supported by a doctor’s certificate. 
• Is there any reason to believe that the rest of the public sector other than dedicated frontline services are any different?
• The public sector already works 10% less hours than a normal working day in the private sector and enjoys holidays 20% to 30% longer, teachers holidays excluded.
• Just tally up the sickies, the corpulent annual leave and now the latest, a further 12 days hols and tell us that this is a sane way to manage theeconomic crisis.  

So let’s get the big breakthrough in the talks right.  Your solution for cutting public sector pay and pensions to save the economy includes giving them even more days off, these ones unpaid.  That’s right no cut in pensions or salary but a cut in services which the rest of us will pay for in delays, longer queues and potentially dangerous response times. This crisis has been characterized by much Government farce and incompetence, but this one takes the biscuit for sheer stupidity. Do you really think that anyone swallows this fudge, that the unions are capable of delivering reform? These are the same guys that erected the restrictive practices that strangled decentralization and created the monster that’s the HSE when it was formed by Health Board mergers. Now we’re being told that their reform agenda is to replace the cuts Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan has insisted upon. Do you think that we’re so stupid we can’t see how this so-called deal is being done under threat and you’ve simply caved in? 

Bottle? Taoiseach, you and what remains of your cabinet,  if  you  sign off on this madness will be shown to have about as much bottle as a bunch of sea sponges waiting for  some spine to crawl up them.  Do this deal and you will go down as the Government who could only rule Bikini Bottom.  Head office The Krusty Krab.