These yellowy autumn mornings bring out the optimist in you. At the risk of sounding like Anne of Green Gables, it could be that something good is emerging from this economic bedlam. You have to look for it, but it's there.

One good thing is that dedicated non-consumers are finally going to get a chance to come over all smug, after years of being vaguely looked-down on.

After all, how much is your life going to change, now, if you don't consider yourself poor but you've never bought a car that was less than five years old?; if you would sooner pay someone not to coat you in emulsified mud, or chocolate, or seaweed?; if you see nothing wrong with a mobile phone that can't even take photographs?; if you're a man who doesn't moisturise, or a woman who doesn't venerate handbags?; if you don't want a smoothie maker or a complete set of Le Creuset cookware or a plasma-screen TV?; if you think Louis Vuitton luggage would be overkill on Ryanair?

If you've been letting yourself go, in other words – at least by the standards of the Sunday supplements – now is your chance to make a dash for the high moral ground, in your cheap shoes. See you there.

Another good thing was Brian Lenihan's appeal to senior civil servants to volunteer for a 10% pay cut, along with ministers, junior minister and secretaries general of government departments.

"There's a bandwagon leaving in 15 minutes. Be on it," said Lenihan. Sure enough, Central Bank governor John Hurley, the comptroller and auditor general John Buckley, the ombudsman Emily O'Reilly, the CIE chairman John Lynch and the financial regulator Pat Neary, quickly obliged. Even the president (bless her) is going to shave 10% off her €325,000-odd salary.

There's a touch of the "let them eat cake" about this, seeing as 10% of the salary of these people amounts to more than the entire annual wage of many citizens, and will not affect the ability of wealthy public servants to afford golf club membership (or yet another pink suit, in the case of the president). It looks like posturing. It is posturing. Still, though, it's an acknowledgement that members of government are overpaid, which is a good thing.

There has long been a school of thought – almost certainly not put forward by those on the average industrial wage or less – that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. However, as most people realise, you tend to get monkeys anyway. Perhaps at last they're coming round to that idea in the corridors of power too.

If so, then maybe now is the time to push for more serious changes in the way government is run, and we might save ourselves a fortune.

Obviously the abolition of the Seanad goes without saying, but we should take the idea further: without delay, we should do away with the requirement of having 166 TDs. Half as many overpaid monkeys could do as much work, especially if given access to a typewriter.

What is the point of having 166 elected represent-atives when at least 140 of them all seem to be all representing the same person? And I don't know about you, but that person is certainly not me. Britain, for example, has 646 MPs – one for every 92,000 people, or thereabouts. Ireland has one for every 26,000 people.

Instead, we should elect 50 or 60 TDs, on a national basis, and we should choose them on the basis of their policies, rather than on their electoral area. That way, cleverly, we would also put an end to the contemptible practice of elected representatives having regard solely for the interests of Borris-in-Ossory/ Mulhuddart in the national parliament.

If TDs earn an average salary of €122,000, then getting rid of even 100 of them would save over €12m a year – enough to pay for around three Combat Poverty Agencies, according to the CPA's 2007 annual report – and that's without even including TDs' cheeky and mean-spirited expenses. Imagine saving €12m a year and at the same time ridding Leinster House of the clientelism that drags so many of its actions into disrepute.

This would be the tightened-belt parliament, elected by those who just need what they need and no more. Government of the non-consumer, by the non-consumer, for the non-consumer: Is there a bit of space left there on the high moral ground?

etynan@tribune.ie

Diarmuid Doyle is on leave