A couple of points about the dazzling success of the IDA programme to lure investment into Ireland. One reason for our success is an education system run largely by the Catholic Church. When, all over the Anglophone world, education became student-oriented, our education system stuck to the baffingly antique principles which entailed work and three Rs.Very old-fashioned - which no doubt was why the former education minister, Niamh Bhreathnach, wanted to reform it and replace the predominantly ecclesiastical influence on school boards with new parent-oriented committees. Very modern - and utterly in conflict with an axiom as old as the principles of teaching: leave well alone.There is no reason on earth why the Catholic Church - and other religious groups - should be allowed such control over the schools of Ireland, for they do not pay for those schools. No reason at all - except that those schools work. They work well. The religious on the school boards no doubt can be seen as a relic of an ancient and unjustified authority; but, equally, they are representatives of a continuity which has served Irish schools well.
Educational reformThere is that tempting argument that we need educational reform to make schools responsive to the needs of parents and children and to the changing priorities of the time. So the argument runs; and sensible people should run even faster from it. A friend of mind sends her son to a school run largely by a parents' committee; but of course, it is not a parents' committee. It is a forum for a couple of lunatic busybodies who stretch every joint parent-teaching meeting into gruelling marathons lasting hours, while they argue for Swahili to be put on the curriculum, or finger-painting, or parenting, or whatever modish idiocy they have been reading about.Teachers teach. Head teachers administer. Parents collect their children outside the school and a couple of times a year listen to what the teachers have to say, and make sure their children do their homework and get ready for their exams. The system works. It produces children who are bright and hard-working and who know that there is no alternative to application. No short-cuts. That is one reason why major companies want to come to Ireland. Nobody says thank you to the Catholic church for sticking to the essentials of old-fashioned education, because nobody says thank you to the Catholic Church for anything any more. But we should be grateful. Thank you bishes, canons, and you terrifying mother superiors: thank you one and all.Something else was no said when news broke about the Boston Scientific investment, with its 2,000 new jobs in Galway and Cork. It is that one of the terms of the deal the IDA does with such companies is to create special tax-arrangements for the US executives working here. We know why they get these arrangements. These executives wouldn't even think of packing a toothbrush if they had to pay Irish personal taxes. So, not merely does their company enter a regime of low corporate taxation, but they too enjoy special taxation provisions which are essential to getting them there (and which are probably illegal). The consequence of this is almost certainly that the senior American executives who work here will be paying far less in tax than the most lowly paid of their employees.Boston ScientificAnd one reason for this can be seen in the very edition of the newspaper which bore tidings of Boston Scientific's move to Ireland. Peter McLoone of the ICTU felt free to boast in a letter to The Irish Times that the latest pay deal the Government has done with public service unions will ensure that public service unions will ensure that public service pensioners will get precisely the same increase in their pensions as the staff serving in the grade and scale point from which they retired."In other words," he writes, "the principle and practice of parity between rises in public sector pay and public sector pensions which was sought by the ICTU's Public Service Committee has been conceded. A floor - not a ceiling - of 3 per cent was also agreed to protect those retired public servants who would have received less than 3 per cent were parity strictly applied."What is interesting here is not just the shocking truth our Pete reveals about how the Government spends money it confiscates from the taxpayers of Ireland, but the manner of his address. He wants the taxpayers of Ireland to know that certain public service pensioners will actually be getting more than their former position within the public service merited even within the extravagant settlement terms the Government has negotiated.Let me tell you something. The employees of Boston Scientific will not be getting any pension deal which will ensure that pensions keep pace with pay-deals within the company. They will not be promised a floor increase of at least three times the rate of inflation; and any union representative who seeks that from American or Korean companies will merely see the blur of homeward-bound figures, and green field sites remaining green.Government extravaganceGovernment after government have debauched public finances to keep public service unions happy, offering deals that are economically unsustainable. No managed pension fund could cope with pay-outs like that. Only a looted government current account is made possible by a monstrous tax regime which is so high we have to exclude from it the very people we need to make our economy work - foreign executives.Now we have public service pensions which are not merely fixed to inflation, but also to every fresh pay-deal ad infinitum. This is cargo-cut economics, as if money is washed ashore in crates. It is the Dollymount Strand school of fiscal management, made possible by robbery from the pay-packets in the private sector and, most astonishingly, by the utter silence of the robbed.