The exit polls are... pretty meaningless, in this case

The Economist, in their ever-increasing drive to make their recently revamped website more interactive, have launched a Global Electoral College, to see how the world would vote in the US Presidential Election.

Needless to say, of the countries whose residents have voted, all of them have ended up a very Democrat shade of blue on the world map.

While I like magazine's the idea, the results of the survey are pretty pointless for obvious reasons. In any event, the 77% showing of support from US Economist readers for Obama contrasts with the much more balanced split of support for the two candidates as can be seen in this wide collection of American polling and media agency polls.

One wonders would international surveys like this, in favour of Obama, have the effect of bolstering support for the Republican candidate? Could support for McCain be increased because Americans, just like Irish voters in the Lisbon Treaty Referendum, according to Charlie McCreevy, don't like to be "bullied" by external forces into delivering the right result?

Public Prone to Preach Public Sector Reform

Terry Prone is to be commended for her recent article in the Irish Examiner defending civil service administrators, who she feels have been made scapegoats for the current ills of the economy. They are a soft target, and Ms Prone is quite right in pointing out how unfair it is to smear a large numbers of workers in this country because of the source of their pay cheque.

While she is correct in stating that the public service may not have caused the recession, the question must be asked, why has the public sector been made a scapegoat in the first place? There can be no doubt that there is a widespread perception of waste of resources within the public service. Another commentator in the same newspaper's opinion pages, Fergus Finlay, has written recently about the large sums of money civil servants can claim in unwarranted travel expenses.

Regarding the "parallel function" served by administrators that Ms Prone writes about, I wonder is she referring to the exasperation felt by many over the duplication of public servant positions brought about by the failure of the decentralisation programme?

I don't think, as Ms Prone writes, that the public feel it is OK to have gardai and teachers, but no administrators. Rather, I think people resent the fact that ground-level public staff, are unfairly compensated in comparison to their senior administrators. The December 2007 Report of the Public Service Benchmarking Body recommended increases in earnings, ranging from 1 per cent to 15 per cent, for public servants at senior levels. No such increase was recommended for rank and file nurses, teachers, gardaí, civil servants, local authority and health sector staff.

It is natural that in the current economic circumstances, the calls for public sector reform are getting louder by the day.

EDIT - Saturday 1st November: Just found out from a neighbour today that The Irish Examiner saw fit to publish the above on their letters page on Monday the 22nd of September, a fortnight after Terry Prone's article. Pure rapid.