It would not be misguided to salute a generation of workers whose absence will be painfully conspicuous

OVER THE course of the next two months, a significant thing will happen in Irish society. Many thousands of teachers, nurses, gardaí and other public servants will disappear from schools, hospitals and institutions all over the State. They will not just be any public servants but a very large chunk of the generation of 50 to 60 year olds who entered the workforce in the 1970s.

They are an important part of the fabric of Irish life and it is genuinely sad that they leave, not with gratitude, but with derision. They are the unnecessary baggage of our economy, the dead weight to be thrown overboard so that the plummeting balloon of State can regain its altitude. They are the fat to be trimmed, superfluous, inessential, surplus to requirements.

But if you talk to kids who are losing much-loved teachers or to patients whose hands have been held by one of these nurses or to the distressed families who desperately needed the kindness and discretion of an experienced garda in their darkest hours, they won’t recognise these descriptions.

Among the 6,000 to 9,000 public servants who are expected to go before the deadline at the end of February, there are certainly people who should never have been in those jobs in the first place and others who have long burned out and are counting the weeks to retirement. But the big majority are among those who make up the heart and soul of the State, the everyday decency of giving what you have to make life better for the community.

You’re not supposed to say this now, of course. There is no easier way to unleash the torrents of bile in the chat rooms than to suggest that demonising public servants might not be the best idea. It is in bad taste to suggest that international comparisons (by the OECD) show that the Irish public service is not bloated by the standards of developed economies, or that the vast bulk of public servants are paid at similar levels to those in comparable economies.

It is inconvenient to note that the average public sector pension (an average distorted by the grossly excessive payments at the top end) is €21,000. When discussing the payment of increments, it is good manners to ignore the fact more than half of those on increments in the Civil Service are clerical officers with a starting salary of €22,000.

But even in this frenzied atmosphere it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the generation of public servants to whom we are now cheerily waving goodbye. It is, I would suggest, a remarkable generation in two important respects.

Many of the teachers and nurses who are now going are, in their own quiet way, social and economic pioneers. They are women – the women who got jobs in the 1970s. They took up employment in the aftermath of the abolition of the marriage ban in 1973. They were not the first women in Ireland to juggle careers with child-rearing, but they were first for whom this balancing act was the norm. They were the ones who had to find out how to do something new, to create a way of life that was later central to the emergence of a modern Irish economy. And remember, they had to do this while navigating their way through the hypocrisies of Catholic-run schools and hospitals – they controlled their fertility apparently without the use of artificial contraceptives which would, of course, have got them sacked.

Without being at all insulting to the younger women who followed them, it is worth bearing in mind that this generation was unusually gifted. When so many of the nurses and teachers who are now leaving came into those professions, there were fewer career opportunities open to women. Women who would later have gone into banking or business or PR went into nursing or teaching. Indeed, many of the senior nurses who are departing would today become doctors. A lot of ambitious, highly motivated women went into our schools and hospitals and those places were much the better for it.

The other thing that’s significant about this generation is that it comes from the era before bullshit and box-ticking became so deeply entrenched. There are qualities that are not dreamt of in the philosophy of management-speak: nous, cop-on, emotional intelligence, instinct.

Allied to experience, those qualities make the difference in the way people are treated by public institutions. Knowing when to push a recalcitrant kid and when to back off, when to wade in with the law and when to calm things down, when a first-time mother needs an epidural – you can’t teach or quantify these things, but they matter.

Together they make up something that has a value rather than a price – an ethic of public service. Many of those who are going embodied that ethic. They won’t be thanked for it as they’re pushed towards the exit. But in communities all over the country their absence will be painfully conspicuous.