What is the Point in Watching the Budget?

Pascal O'Donoghue, TD, Minister for Finance

Do you plan to watch the budget today, Reader? Will you listen to the Minister, thrill to the analysis, and carefully ponder the responses to the budget from the parties’ various spokespersons on finance when they, too, address Dáil Éireann?

And are you entirely sure that’s wise? All things considered, would you not be better off beating yourself unconscious with a brick instead?

You say that’s crazy talk. No, it’s not. Beating yourself unconscious with a brick is every bit as sensible as listening to the budget and expecting the government to exercise any control over the public finances – insofar as they government can figure out what the public finances are in the first place, of course.

The one reason the country hasn’t sunk beneath the waves – and I thank almighty God for it – is that we must have our budgets signed off in Berlin anymore, even since that time we went crazy buying two-bed apartments with one parking space and thinking they were little goldmines. The majority of the spending is already spent before the Minister got out of bed this morning. What the Minister will actually be talking about is what he’s allowed to spend from the change discovered at the back of the couch, as the big money is only handled by the big boys any more.

And even then, the unhappy man will still make a bags of it. His is an impossible task.

Professor Séamus Coffey, head of the Fiscal Advisory Council, was interviewed on This Week on RTÉ Radio One on Sunday. Professor Coffey noted that every year for the past fifteen years the Department of Health has been unable to calculate its spending correctly.

This is phenomenally bad practice, and what makes it worse is that every time the Department manages to underestimate spending. It’s not that the Department of Health gets its sums wrong, as such. It’s that it always gets them wrong in the same way.

For fifteen years the Department has tried to calculate how much it needs, and each year it’s underestimated its budget and had to be dug out. This is despite always going higher than last year for each of the fifteen years.

This isn’t bad maths. If it were bad maths, they’d have over-estimated at least once. This is something else.

Let’s put that in perspective. Let’s say you’re saving for a mortgage, and you decide to cut down on the pints. You budget yourself a fifty-Euro-a-fortnight pinting allowance, and swear never to break it.

At the end of the fortnight, you do your sums and you find that instead of blowing fifty Euro on porter, you’ve blown eighty. OK. You were unrealistic in your initial calculation. There are few places in Dublin city centre where you can get a pint for less than a fiver, and five pints a week isn’t even half the weekly limit as set out by the killjoy Department of Health. OK. So you recalibrate, and your new fortnightly pinting budget is now eighty Euro.

You examine your spend after this second fortnight and find out you’ve spent one hundred Euro.

This isn’t great. Not only are you still over budget, but you’ve doubled your initial estimate. This is bad. You feel bad. You’re not looking forward to telling your girlfriend, who’s counting on you pulling your weight for this mortgage. But at least you know now what the price of booze is. You budget for a hundred bucks this time, and go again.

That’s three budgets reader. The Department of Health have got this wrong for fifteen budgets in a row. If that were the case where you were saving for your mortgage, it’s safe to say that you could forget about the mortgage. You could forget about the girlfriend too, as she’d long ago have walked out. But you yourself are not bothered about a mortgage now, of course. Why would you need a mortgage when you now live under a bridge, off your cake on a cocktail of Buckfast and dry sherry all the livelong day?

Minister Harris, a man borne down by the sense of his own dignity, is inclined to respond that there is no discretionary spend in Health. If some invalid, some wretched soul, were to call to a hospital, how could the hospital send him or her away?

Such an unfortunate should not be sent away, of course. But your faithful correspondent can tell you who should be sent away. The genius who agreed to pay €6.5 million per year in rent for the new Department of Health offices eighteen months before anybody actually moves into the place could do with sending away.

The only reason whoever is monitoring how well hospital consultants are maintaining their working division between private and public patients while working in public hospitals can’t be sent away because it seems that person doesn’t exist in the first place.

According to last week’s report of the Comptroller and Auditor General, no more than 20% of beds in public hospitals are meant to be set aside for private patients. However, beds are considered plain beds, not public beds or private beds, and “the HSE does not draw comparisons on activity levels between hospitals or individual consultants in order to monitor trends in activity over time.” So that’s bound to be going well.

You may think your faithful correspondent is picking on the Department of Health. Not at all. Consider this shaggy dog story, as reported in yesterday’s Times Ireland:

The Irish Greyhound Board had their old stadium in Harold’s Cross valued in March of last year. Savills' reckoned it was worth twelve million Euro if developed, six million if it remained a dog track.

A few weeks later, the Department of Education asked the Valuation Office to survey the dog track at Harold’s Cross, and see how much it was worth. Harold’s Cross could do with a new school, you see.

Where Savills' considered the site worth €12 million, the Valuation Office thought it worth more €23 million. The Department of Education bought the site for €23 million in May of last year. Did the site more than double in value in two months? What exactly are we missing here? Other than our shirts, of course - we lost those long ago.

Now. Suppose you’re some sort of nut who thinks maybe the country would be in better shape if we spent money wisely, instead of finding new and, frankly, quite astonishing ways to waste it? For whom exactly should you vote in the coming election? Whom can you trust to get a start on that task?

I’ll give you a minute, dear Reader. Then you can go off and find yourself a brick.

a brick.

Free Travel More Dangerous than the Government Realise

Even though the budget isn’t actually due for another three months, and even though Dáil Éireann isn’t even due to sit again for another fortnight, a year’s holidays in some countries, the sky is dark with kites being flown.

As the kites bob and weave on the breeze, there is a highly-remunerated government advisor in a shed somewhere with a squealometer, registering the level of howls each proposed cut makes. The louder the howl, the more the minister is likely to moonwalk back out of trouble before the dread blade falls. If there’s no discernable howl, into the mulcher she goes.

This blind-man’s-buff school of economic policy is worrying when you consider that few governments has had as long to formulate their agenda before taking the reins of office. When you consider that not since WT Cosgrove had to form the very state itself after a bloody civil war has a government had so clear a task before it, the shirking of that responsibility is staggering.

There is no precedent in Irish electoral history for the kicking Fianna Fáil, the perpetual party of government, received in the last election. The electorate has been cross with Fianna Fáil before, and sent them to bed with no supper. This time, Fianna Fáil have been thrown out of the house entirely, and told be damned to them.

The government was elected on a bill of reform. Reform of public finances and reform of public life, to ensure that the recent calibre of disaster was never visited on Ireland again.

Everybody knew that this is what the government had to do. Everybody, that is, except the actual government themselves. A dread terror stole over the heart of the nation when Enda Kenny did not go into government on his own, and dare Fianna Fáil to support their own policies. Instead, Fine Gael opted for politics as usual, going into coalition with a Labour party with whom Fine Gael agree on nothing except that they are neither of them Fianna Fáil.

The government sat on their hands for the first year of their five year term, content to blame Fianna Fáil, Europe, the IMF, the church and anybody but the people for the country’s woes. Even though Enda Kenny went on television to tell the nation that the debt is not the nation’s fault, it does still seem to be the nation that’s footing the actual bill. It’s hard to have it both ways.

And now, having long-fingered manning up in their first year, the coalition finds itself with a hard budget to implement while about to be bogged down by the two biggest oil-and-water debates of the past quarter-century, abortion and children’s rights. Those two kraken circle the island, waiting to come ashore and wreck havoc, while in the meantime the cabinet desperately fly kite after kite.

Yesterday’s kite was a hinted suggestion that the government were “looking at” free travel for pensioners in the same way Charlotte Corday looked at Jean-Paul Marat. Reform of the public service – and pay deals are only a part of that reform – is what the government should be about but the combined absence of both vision and bottle mean there’s no way that’s getting touched. And as such, the kites go up to establish who’ll squeal the least.

However. If the government think that that zapping free travel for the elderly is a free shot, they ought to think again. Not only do they not understand the mandate they were given by the people, neither do they understand just how the country has changed since any of them last had to look at a grocery bill and wonder if the household could afford it.

Free travel for the elderly began as a relatively cheap perk for pensioners in the 1970s. It was nice to have it, but it’s unlikely it was used all that much. Most pensioners would use free travel to visit their children and grandchildren, and in the 1970s and 80s those children either lived locally or abroad. Free travel didn’t come into it, and once you’ve seen Lough Key Forest Park once, that’ll do you ‘til you’re called.

But that’s changed now, as Ireland’s grand plan to not export her youth was to build concrete jungles around the cities to house them instead. As such, couples with young families now find themselves trying to raise children as children were never raised before, with both partners working and out of the house from the early hours until the dead of night.

Childcare in such circumstances works out at about a grand a month I’m told. You know when there’s a mortgage rage decrease of 0.25% and we’re told it’s great news for mortgage holders as they save €500 a year? You’d want to lop more than twenty times that off the bill before those mortgage holders would break even on childcare. And that’s forgetting that they’re paying off on values that do not exist any more, on the basis of trying to keep in some ways sane.

How do these twenty-first centuries families, who will be celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Rising in three years’ time, cope? How do they make ends meet?

Because all over Ireland, the Sunday evenings that used to only see students on buses and trains on their way back to college now see those students being joined by grannies who will be staying in their children’s box rooms in Lucan and Clonsilla and Blanchardstown and Louisa Bridge, wherever in God’s name that is, trying to help them make ends meet until this storm passes. And one of the reasons they’re able to do it is because they have free travel on buses and trains.

That’s a very delicate ecosystem that relies on a lot of factors in balance. It’s hard on granny, it’s hard on the parents, it’s hard on everyone. If the government pulls the rug on that, a much bigger house of cards may come crashing down with it. And it’ll make abortion look like sorting someone for false teeth in comparison.

Preventing the Future - Irish Politics Crippled by Lack of Vision

The spectacular trauma of the economic crash resulted in the current Government receiving the greatest popular mandate since the first Dáil itself. This should have Enda Kenny and his government a tremendous sense of power and purpose.

But the Government doesn’t seem empowered by the mandate, or even intimidated by it. It seems indifferent to it, the strangest reaction of all.

It’s like the coalition is unaware of the state of crisis in the country. Instead of realizing that they have been mandated to set the foundations of Ireland 3.0, the Government seem to think it’s business as usual.

It was Fianna Fáil’s turn, and now it’s our turn. So we’ll go through the same motions, but instead of their lads getting the gravy, it’ll be ours. Any notion of this being the sort of messing that sank the country in the first place seems beyond them.

The cynicism of the education cuts crystalizes the issue. For all their eagerness to use the IMF and the troika as an excuse, the Government is every bit as empowered to govern as any other government since the Treaty. Economic sovereignty has not been removed, contrary to popular belief.

The Government has to pay back the IMF just previous governments had to pay back loans gained in the money markets. The belt might be tighter, but the suit remains the same. It’s not like Michael Noonan is the first Irish Minister for Finance to look at an empty larder.

It’s a matter of supreme indifference to the IMF what the Government cut or don’t cut. All they care about is getting their money back. Because if they did care, the IMF would tell the Government that the proposed education cuts are not the way to go about planning for the future.

The particular cuts in question are the reduction in teacher numbers by two thousand and the ending of free post-graduate courses. Why cut two thousand teachers and post-grad grants? To save money. Are there other ways to save money? Yes, of course there are. So why choose this way? The reason for the cut is a legacy of the last government, but where and how deep is entirely up to the present one.

It could be An Spailpín’s cynical way of looking at the world, but the most obvious reason for making these cuts is because there’s no-one to complain. Two thousand teachers aren’t being laid off. Those teachers don’t exist yet, so nobody is fully sure if this is coming to their particular door.

The Teacher Unions represent current teachers, not projected ones. And while they should be looking to the future of their profession – well, it’s a fault in the Irish psyche that we value self-interest above all else.

It’s the same with post-grad grants. It’s a cut to the future, rather than the present. USI may huff and puff but once they’re marching down O’Connell Street, who’ll be able to tell them apart from Occupy Dame Street, The Irish Anti-War Movement or whatever other spurious organisations that have chosen that particular Saturday to waste the public’s time? Checkmate, sonny.

The Government was mandated to turn the system upside down, but it has no sense of that mandate. It has no sense of how the nation is at a crossroads in our history. It has no sense of that at all.

Tom Garvin published a book called Preventing the Future in 2006, about the myriad failures in Irish economic policy since the foundation of the state. But the subtext of the book is interesting – a tacit understanding that all those disasters are in the past, and that we have now started Ireland 2.0.

The same subtext is in David McWilliams’ Pope’s Children, for all he might try to reimagine it now – the idea that the Irish would never be so poor or so stupid again. The book is subtitled "Ireland's New Elite," after all.

There is no sense of how wrong that assumption proved to be being projected by the current Government. There is no sense of either a realization that the Irish are doomed to be poor or that the Irish are a nation who were on the cusp of something great, hit a bump in the road but is fully capable of rising again.

The current state of the nation is one or other of those alternatives. It cannot be both. And we need to know which it is if we are to progress.

Instead of answering that crucial question, the first six months of the administration have been spent on self-congratulation, optics, pope-bashing, losing a referendum and trying to pin the blame solely on Alan Shatter, now that Fianna Fáil aren’t around any more. It has not been spent in rolling up sleeves, taking stock or doing the vision thing.

The next six weeks will be about furiously shoving the round peg of no new taxes into the square hole of no new cuts. This is because finding jockeys for hobby-horses takes precedence over realizing that this Government has a mandate for change like no administration before.

It’s such a pity that they seem too dumb to realise what an incredible chance this is to change the country for ever. God help us all.

The Budget - Ireland Late to See the Big Picture

The two most famous budgets in Irish history are famous because of their detail. In yesterday’s budget, the detail didn’t matter at all.

Ernest Blythe took a shilling off the old age pension, a ten per cent reduction, in the late 1920s and was never forgiven for it. Blythe was a scholar and a patriot, but his name lives in infamy because of that one decision. John Bruton’s career was always haunted by a proposal to tax children’s shoes in 1982 in a budget that was never passed – the entire Government fell on that one detail.

And that’s the problem of Ireland in our history. There is no big picture economic thinking. We are eternally hung up on detail.

For the first eighty years of the state, there was no actual need for big picture thinking, because Ireland was so stony broke we didn’t have the loot to spend in the first place. The only time there was any money in the state was during the boom years, and where the big picture seemed to be: how quickly can we blow all this lovely dough?

Very quickly indeed, as it turns out. And that’s why the detail of the 2011 budget doesn’t matter. When the IMF arrived, we suddenly got to see the big picture for the fist time in our economic history.

When you’re being fed into the woodchipper, it doesn’t really matter whether you go in feet first of head first. It’s just a question of personal preference. You’re getting mulched either way.

We are now so broke that the only – the only – aim we have as a state is to get into a position where we can be indebted to the international bond markets rather than the ECB and the IMF. Everything else is window dressing. The money’s not there. It’s just not.

While the bailout rolls out and the state’s hands are effectively tied behind her back, it would be nice if we as a nation took the time to have a good think about who we are and who want to be. What we have, what we want and what we can afford. And if we could try, as the anniversary of 1916 looms, to give some vague impression that the dead generations from whom Ireland receives her old tradition of nationhood did not die in vain.

It’s gone beyond a question of toxic banks now. It’s a question of toxic states, a two-tier Europe or else a return to sterling and a much more resonant loss of sovereignty than all that old guff we heard from Pat Rabbitte and others in recent years.

The country is so deep in a hole we can barely see the top anymore, but claims that things can’t get worse are nonsense. Not only can they get worse, they’ve already been worse. And you don’t have to go back to Peig Sayers to find the evidence.

Why did the 1982 Government want to tax children’s shoes in the first place? Because they were concerned that women with small feet would buy children’s shoes, rather than women’s shoes, in order to save money.

Reader, when you can imagine the gossip columnists of the Sunday papers marching to the children’s section of Penny’s and then writing up a return to children’s t-bar sandals as a fashionista must-have, then you’ll know that all the icing is well gone from the cake. In the meantime, we take our medicine and hope to God that, as the IMF bailout runs its course, we’ll emerge wiser as well as older.

Hard Times Return to Erin - And Could Be Here a While

Brian Lenihan swung his axe yesterday, and the steel bit home into an Ireland that had been living beyond its means. Worst of all, this is not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. The future looks bleak for quite some time. Fast forward four years and seven weeks, to the Late Late Show of December 1st, 2012...

The titles roll as the owl takes his customary flight over the credits. The cameras go live to studio 4, where host Pat Kenny comes out to the cheers of the studio audience. The lights are flickering slightly, and Kenny doesn’t look quite as well groomed as is his wont; during the show, he keeps tugging at the collar of his suit jacket, as if it itches.

PAT KENNY: Hello and welcome to the Late Late Show, sponsored by Lidl – remember folks, turnips are only five Euro a pound in Lidl for the happy hour this Saturday, from four to five, be sure to get their early, and dress for battle – and what a show we’ve got for you tonight. But let’s get right to it, and welcome my first guest, the fabulous Caroline Morahan!

Wild cheers. Caroline comes on stage, waves to the crowd, sits down, bats Pat’s paw smartly away from her shapely knee, and smiles radiantly – or as radiantly as radiantly gets when a few choppers are missing.

PAT: Caroline! How fabulous you look!

CAROLINE (whistling slightly, due to the gaps in the teeth): Pat, you’re too much! Ah hah hah hah!

PAT: Caroline, what is your secret? How are you getting through the recession and remaining so fabulous?

CAROLINE: Well Pat, I was going to keep it to myself, but I can’t not share it with the sisters, ah hah hah hah.

Laughter, hissing from the audience. And a strange smell, truth be told.

CAROLINE: You see Pat, the secret is soup.

PAT: Soup!

CAROLINE: Yes Pat. Nettle soup.

PAT: Nettles! My goodness. Tell me more.

CAROLINE (forgetting herself, and leaning into him): Well Pat, one thing I think we neglect in this country is our traditional Irish cuisine. I mean France is famous for its cuisine, it’s impossible to think of Italy without their fabulous pasta dishes, so I thought: why not get back to good old Irish tradition?

PAT (as the paw snakes across the desk): Why not, indeed?

CAROLINE (wise to the play, sitting smartly back): Exactly! So I got on my bike and cycled out to Dunsink, where you can get the most beautiful nettles, and I spent an hour or two picking them and popping them into my basket. Home then, and I popped a big cauldron on the open fire and just threw in the nettles. Six hours boiling – and don’t forget ladies, boiling also heats the room – on the embers, drain and serve a nourishing broth for all the family.

PAT: Well, it’s certainly suiting you Caroline. Your skin looks simply radiant – do you find nettle soup good for the skin?

CAROLINE (through gritted teeth): You’ll never know, Pateen my boy.

PAT: Let’s have a big hand for Miss Caroline Morahan, ladies and gentlemen!

Applause.

PAT: Caroline is off now, as her shift with the taxi company starts at half-ten. Well, it’s all go. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our first musical guest, all the way from the ‘sixties, it’s The Who!

The camera pans across to two old men, one with a guitar. He raises his right high in the air, slashes down on his Rickenbacker – and all the lights go out.

GUITARIST: Wot the fack is this?

PAT: Ah, Jesus! Where’s the floor manager?

AUDIENCE: What matter as long as we’re indoors! It’s so cold! Brr!

PAT: What do you mean, meter? I don’t know anything about any meter? What? Well, you bloody cycle it. I don’t care how long it’s been since you’ve eaten – Christ, some people can only think of their bellies. Get peddlin’ – we need the light!

Pat slowly comes back into view. It looks a little like a daguerreotype of the 19th century, but beggars, choosers, talk to the hand, yada yada.

PAT: And now, a harrowing real life tale. Please welcome my next guests, Dan O’Hara and journalist Liz Bennett.

Two guests walk on, Dan and Liz.

PAT: In 2008, in the first year of the Depression –

AUDIENCE: Oh God between us and all harm, the Depression! Will there every be joy agin in Erin?

PAT: Ah, keep the head, will ye? Or else it’s back out in the snow. Now, where was I? Oh yes - in the first year of the Depression, Dan O’Hara was sold by his father into slavery. Now, with the help of journalist Liz Bennett of the Daily Mirror, Dan’s story is finally told. Welcome Dan.

DAN: Thanks now Pat, thanks.

PAT: Dan, your father sold you into slavery back in 2008. Is that true?

DAN: Oh it’s true Pat, yeah, not a word of a lie.

PAT: And what price did he get?

DAN: That man sold me for three hundred Euro and two hundred worth of parts for an E class Merc.

AUDIENCE: Oh!

LIZ: It’s shameful!

DAN: I’m very ashamed.

PAT: Oh dear, oh dear.

DAN: I’ll never forgive him. I mean, I was a big, strong boy. He could have got eight hundred, even a grand cash, if he’d a only tried.

LIZ: Dan’s father proved, time and again, to have no head for money.

DAN: No head at all, at all. No good with the cash.

PAT: Dear oh dear.

LIZ: Pat, you have to remember, slavery was still underground in 2008. It was a sellers’ market, and this man settled for a mere half brick. It’s a scandal, and it's time that this story was told.

DAN: No good at the sums, like.

PAT: Dear oh dear. Dan, Liz, thank you for coming, you’re both very brave.
And that’s all we have for you this evening ladies and gentlemen. We hope that you enjoyed the show, and don’t forget, next week, it’s the Late Late Toy Show!

Pat gives a big wink to the camera.

PAT: So don’t forget to tune in and join all the wonderful boys and girls as they work their little fingers to the bone making cheap tat for sale in Laos, Myanmar, and Bhutan. Until then, good night!







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