A GUY loses his job. Sad. Sadder still when the guy is in his middle years, and the firing is a bit public. As is the case of a Minister of State who didn't get reelected to the Dail during the general election.

Then he ups and gets the top job with the Construction Industry Federation.

Well, tut, tut. Tsk, tsk, even.

Disgraceful. Isn't it? While not suggesting anything against Tom Parlon personally, the Green Party is talking about changing the system so that a moratorium of a year might elapse before a former minister took up such a job.

The Greens are right in the sense that a recent minister, going into a lobbying body devoted to the area wherein he most recently served, carries with him a load of informational baggage which might be useful to that body: who's thinking what, and which nascent notions may make it into public policy.

The Greens are even more right . . . setting Tom Parlon to one side . . . in worrying about the possibility of a minister feathering his future nest while in office: "I'll see ye right on this issue, and in due course, ye'll ensure I get a soft landing, right?"

The difficulty is that the proposed moratorium wouldn't solve either problem. A minister who wants to go to work for Buggins Bakery and is prevented from so doing for a year cannot be stopped meeting Joe and Mikey Buggins socially in the intervening 12 months and marking their card, based on his ministerial knowledge. A seriously crooked minister who, while in office, does a good turn or two for the Buggins brothers is not going to go broke if he has to kick his heels for a year before he can legally join them.

In the specific case of Tom Parlon, no Buggins-type accusations have been made, largely because as a Minister of State he didn't have that much in the way of goodies to give out.

The nearest anyone has come to hitting a bum note about his departure and elevation is to murmur that he'd been in charge of the Office of Public Works.

In this, he was lucky. The OPW is one of the most interesting arms of government, staffed by a weird bag of highly qualified and disparate professionals, most of whom seem to love what they do and do it with a passion. But it's not exactly a big secret, what the OPW does or what it's planning.

So it's not really on the cards that Parlon is going to sit down at his first board meeting in the CIF and say: "Gather round me, folks, while I tell you the third secret of the OPW."

More to the point Parlon, before he donkey-carted his way into the Progressive Democrats, headed up a national umbrella body with a mass of complex problems called the Irish Farmers Association. To set aside this highly relevant experience and the presumed expertise with which it enriched him, because of his brief sojourn in a mini-ministerial role, could be interpreted as restraint of trade.

And then there's the question: can you prevent a former minister who gets dumped by the electorate in a general election from immediately going to work for a PR company as an advisor on Public Affairs, as has happened in recent years? Yes, of course, some commercial firms have stipulations in their employment contracts that get the new recruit to promise not to resign and go immediately to work for a competitor company. But not many companies actually invoke that clause. The companies who do are fairly sure they could make it stick in a court of law, because the departing executive provably owns sensitive information about a product which could be crucially useful to a competitor.

In political terms, were the moratorium to be applied, the end results would be catastrophic for individuals without necessarily providing a benefit to the public good.

Look at it this way: Ms Thingummy has been a Minister or a Junior Minister. She loses her seat in the general election and perhaps fails to get into the Senate, so she cannot use the Seanad as a Limbo in which to rest her soul for a while before re-entering the Dail. The Seanad has a recuperative function for TDs who lose their seats. It allows them to park in the middle of the city (no small advantage, these days) work in the area they know, and continue to hang out with their own circle of friends and enemies.

A loser in the general election, particularly if they've been a minister, has that set of friends amputated in one blow. Partly because their former colleagues are too damn busy to take the time to stay in contact. Partly because winners instinctively withdraw from losers, lest contagion strike. In addition, the former minister is abruptly removed from all the support systems provided within their department.

In their own constituency, they become instantly irrelevant to the favour-seekers and hangers-on. It's like a multiple bereavement, with betrayal and self-blame thrown in. Can we legitimately make them unemployable for a year as well?

Nonetheless, given the pattern of stable governments with ministers in the same department for considerable periods of time, there's a strong case for reexamination of the information those ministers have and the uses to which it can be put after they leave office.

Shane Coleman is on leave