A new programme for government. Who do they think they’re kidding?

ON Saturday, I went to an education conference where Garret FitzGerald spoke about the decline of moral authority in Ireland.

It was fascinating and learned, and you could hear his anxiety as he spoke. He concentrated mostly on how the authority of the church had disappeared, ever since the debate on contraception in the late 1960s, and on how unprepared we were for the period of rapid social change we have experienced.

But he touched on politics too, remarking at one point that no one could teach youngsters to respect politics until politicians changed their behaviour. And he also departed from his script to say that the country needed a new beginning in political terms — “but that,” he added, “is a discussion for another day”.

And then I came home, and later that day I read the new programme for government adopted with such fanfare by the Green party conference. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the Greens would spend the whole day in the glare of publicity, but no one in the media even thought it worthwhile to ask Fianna Fáil what mechanism they were going to use to adopt the programme.

Under Brian Cowen’s signature on the document there are two titles — Taoiseach, and leader of Fianna Fáil. But apparently while John Gormley had to sit through a party conference before he could be sure he had done the right thing in signing the document, Brian Cowen has to consult nobody.

And then, on Sunday morning, I listened to Gormley being interviewed on Newstalk. Half way through the interview he said to presenter Karen Coleman, “in a few week’s time, after the budget, I’ll be sitting here and you’ll be asking me how I can possibly justify that cut”.

His colleague Eamon Ryan, when he was interviewed later on Sunday morning by Marian Finucane, took exactly the same line. Despite the fact that he had just completed negotiations on a programme for government, he couldn’t possibly anticipate anything that might be in the budget in a few weeks.

As the day wore on, it became clearer and clearer (just to take one example) that the Green ministers might well have signed off on a programme for government that forbids the reintroduction of third-level fees, but if college registration fees are doubled in the budget they won’t regard that as a breach of the programme. In fact, John Gormley was actually quoted on an RTÉ news report on Sunday afternoon saying “there is no intention to reintroduce third-level fees but that increasing registration fees was a matter for universities to decide”.

Later in the exact same news report, he’s quoted further as saying that “cutting public sector pay was a budgetary matter and was not part of the new programme”. Throughout the weekend, Green party spokespeople kept repeating that particular mantra — “that will be dealt with in the budget, and of course we couldn’t possibly talk about the budget”.

These endless references to the budget are nothing but flannel, of course. Throughout the years of social partnership, agreements were concluded almost on an annual basis that were fully reflected in the Government’s budgets and all the social partners knew, often down to fine detail, what was going to be announced on budget day.

I have to honest with you — I’ve never regarded myself as naive. In a review of Bertie Ahern’s autobiography I learned that he was never able to trust me because I regarded myself as having a conscience (Mind you, that reminded me a bit of a remark I once heard attributed to the great Ray Burke when he said, about a particular barrister, that he had never been able to trust a lawyer who wouldn’t take cash).

But anyway, whatever about having a conscience, I’ve always thought I was politically smart as well.

But I’m nowhere near as smart as the Greens. I actually read the whole programme for government right through, with some admiration. It’s aspirational, to be sure, but the aspirations in it are good ones. It’s disturbingly silent on some things that are crucially important. There is a lot of gobbledegook in places where there should be plain language and in places where there should be clear timelines. And of course, there is the get-out clause of “subject to resources” right up there on page one.

But it’s not a bad document by any means. If it meant anything. But the interviews they gave, as soon as it was adopted, demonstrate that the document means nothing at all. Two parties, already in government, sit down to renegotiate their own programme six weeks before the budget and leave a lot of the key decisions to be made on budget day? What nonsense.

Take social welfare, for instance, one of the most critical areas on which the programme is silent — “because it’s a budgetary matter”.

How can any serious politician sit down to negotiate a programme for government and leave out perhaps the single most important issue for thousands of families in the country? There can only be one reason. A programme for government has been negotiated for one reason and one reason only — to give its authors a mandate to stay in government and preside over a budget that will be a complete negation of the ambitions and aspirations of the programme itself.

THE whole thing is an exercise in cynicism. Suppose John Gormley had said to his conference: “Before you vote on this programme, I’d better tell you that it has nothing at all to say about social welfare. That’s because the budget in six weeks or so is likely to be looking at wide-ranging cuts in a number of areas that affect families, and especially poorer families. And there’s other stuff that’s likely to be very controversial as well, that we already know about but can’t tell you because of cabinet confidentiality.”

Do you think if he’d said that he’d have got his two-thirds majority? This brings me back to Garret FitzGerald. The Greens might be trying to sell their programme as transformational. It’s not — it’s meaningless, because all it is is a mandate to stay there, to hang on in.

I’d be willing to bet a week’s wages that on budget day this year not one commentator will refer to the revised programme for government. It will have been forgotten completely in the short period between now and then because it was never meant to be otherwise. Those who signed it knew, throughout their negotiations, that the budget is the only thing that matters, and the programme for government is nothing more than a coat of gloss paint.

In its own way, that sort of politics is more cynical than the padding of expenses or the high living that has become such a feature of our political life.

It’s not even so much that it’s not going to be delivered — it’s more that its authors know full well it’s not going to happen. The decline of moral authority that Garret FitzGerald spoke about will continue for as long as cynicism is the prevailing force in politics. And this past weekend’s events were riddled with cynicism.