So, today there is a work to rule on with the public service unions.  This is indeed a controversial issue and one where there is no right side and no wrong side.

Naturally, as a public service worker, I have a particular interest in this dispute, though I am not on a work to rule, whatever that means.

I have taken two pay cuts in the past 8 months and these have not been nice.  They amount to the fact that I am working one day a week for free and only get paid for four out of five days now.

The staff of AIB and Bank of Ireland - two of the institutions that are responsible for the mess we find ourselves in - have been given pay rises in that time.

That’s enough of the finger pointing - it doesn’t get us anywhere.The thing that disappoints me most about the current economic nightmare (yes, I chose my word carefully, it really does give me cause for having bad dreams) is the assertion that the public service have not been overperforming in recent years.  In my department we have ony 15 permanent academic staff (25% more than a decade ago), but we teach about 250% more students and have twice as many degree courses.  We are flat-out all the time trying to provide this service and the thanks we get for it is IBEC and people like Shane Ross saying that there were no changes in how we worked.

Naturally, the statistics that are used are averaged out over the entire public service, so maybe there are places where productivity has gone down.  If this is the case, then those of use in 3rd level education are really being short-changed (having our pay cut and being told we are lazy).  We are now running a department of biology at Maynooth that is lean, stressed-out, losing staff, carrying out top-quality internationally-competitive research, teaching more students than I ever thought possible with such small numbers of staff and at breaking point in terms of when people are just going to pack it in.

The university has to lose another 3% of its staff in the coming year - mostly this will be achieved by retirements.  We will all have to teach more, do more administration and less research.  Nobody with a good research record will want this.

The one thing that Garrett Fitzgerald did not hit in the recession in the 1980s was education.

That was excellent foresight.