‘DIFFICULT CHOICES are never easy.” Thus the Taoiseach in his address to the nation on Sunday night.

Savour the phrase. Hold it to the light. Swirl it round the glass. Stick your nose in deep and inhale the rich aromas of full-bodied absurdity. Get the pungent whiff of carmelised cliche and curdled smugness.

Imagine the work that went into crafting it, the bleary-eyed, caffeine-soaked speechwriters in their lonely eyrie, in the early hours of Sunday morning, running through the variations: hard choices are seldom soft; nasty things are never pleasant; difficult options tend to be difficult. The ecstatic high-fives when the quiet kid suddenly pipes up – hey guys, how about this: difficult choices are never easy. The rush of knowing they’d nailed it this time – the perfect tautology, the complete annihilation of any smidgen of meaning or content.

Romantic that I am, I like to imagine that one of those backroom boys, so selflessly slaving on behalf of the nation, was Ciarán Conlon, who has long been one of Enda Kenny’s key communications people. But this could hardly be so, since in Ciarán’s case, difficult choices actually are easy. He made the difficult and patriotic choice to reject the “ridiculous” maximum salary of €92,000 he should have received as an adviser to Richard Bruton. As detailed by Ken Foxe in the Mail on Sunday, Ciarán held out for €127,000 instead. And, at the personal instance of Enda Kenny, he got it.

So here’s what a difficult choice actually looks like. We could have Ciarán for €127,000 or we could have five care assistants for people with intellectual disabilities at a starting salary of €26,590 each, totalling €132,950. Or, to be fair, we could have Ciarán on the basic salary for a Government adviser of €80,051 plus two care assistants.

So the Taoiseach really had three options: no Ciarán but five people with intellectual disabilities given some kind of dignity; a somewhat grumpy Ciarán on a mere €80,000; or a happy Ciarán on €127,000. Enda bit the bullet and took the difficult decision that the nation in its hour of crisis needs a happy Ciarán, on the top of his game.

Which may well be true. Ciarán’s expertise is in marketing and PR, in crafting messages. He might, for example, be able to help the Government explain his own salary without digging holes for itself, as Simon Coveney managed to do on Morning Irelandyesterday. He told us that the salary cap for advisers could be breached when the “best people” were being recruited from the private sector and taking pay cuts as a result. Ciarán was recruited by the Government from that successful private-sector company, Fine Gael. If the party was paying him much more than €127,000, it is obviously in receipt of far too much public money.

The truth, of course, is that “difficult choices” are much more difficult for some people than for others. We could pay more than the full wage of a speech and language therapist from the difference between the basic salary for a Government adviser and what Ciarán’s actually getting. Who, exactly, is that “difficult” for? For the 23,000 children on waiting lists for speech therapy – over 10,000 waiting even to be assessed? Or for the members of the Government striking poses about how brave they are to make these tough decisions while quietly looking after their own?

The Taoiseach told us on Sunday night: “Before asking families to make sacrifices, we also insisted on sacrifices from those at the top.” The idea seems to be that there is some kind of equivalence between Bertie Ahern’s sacrifice of €80 a week in his €150,000-plus pension and the nine-year-old child with Down syndrome who’s told she has missed the “window of opportunity” to learn to speak because no therapist is available. There’s actually a big difference. The difference between the gesture of “making a sacrifice” and the reality of being sacrificed.

The truly difficult decisions are not being made. It’s hard to make the one choice that really matters: the protection of the most vulnerable. Kenny’s basic proposition – that we’re all in this together – is patently untrue.

If the pain was being shared fairly, this State would be a more equal society than it was before the crash, because the well-off would be bearing more of the burden. New figures from the Central Statistics Office show that the opposite is happening. Inequality is rising rapidly. In 2009, the top 20 per cent had 4.3 times the income of the bottom 20 per cent. In 2010, the ratio was 5.5.

The official response to the crash, in other words, is widening the gap between the haves and have-nots. And a Government that still believes, at heart, that a political PR man is many times more valuable than a speech therapist doesn’t have the will to challenge this reality.

The Taoiseach’s appeal to shared sacrifice sounds hollow because it is hollow. The rhetoric is literally empty.