Coalition let down by broken promises and campaign lies
“Ní neart, go cur le chéile — together, le chéile, as one Ireland, there is no problem that we cannot confront,” he trilled, on February 23, just two days before polling.
A Labour government, he insisted, could be trusted to implement the pre-election policies and promises that it had solemnly made to the Irish people.
These included pledges like the one made on February 23, to protect child benefit from any further cuts, when he said; “enough is enough — families can take no more”.
Aspiring TD Alex White echoed this sentiment when he released a statement, headlined “protection of children a priority, even in difficult times”, on February 22.
“First and foremost, we believe that our children should not be made to pay for the current economic crisis and for this reason, Labour will not cut child benefit, particularly in the wake of recent budgets in which family incomes have already taken a substantial hit,” he said.
Roisin Shorthall again underscored this point on February 17 when she highlighted Labour’s latest campaign poster.
“This advert focuses attention on the proposal contained in the Fine Gael Fiscal Plan to cut the budget for child benefit … Fine Gael has made it clear that its ambition is to win an overall majority, but what is very clear is families need Labour in government in order to protect their interests,” she said.
While protecting current rates of child benefit was a central plank of Labour’s increasingly desperate campaigning in the dying days of the campaign, it was also making promises in other key areas.
In a statement entitled “Fine Gael’s uncosted graduate tax will lead to brain drain out of Ireland”, the party was unequivocal about third-level fees.
“Labour is opposed to third-level fees by either the front or back doors … Labour abolished third-level fees for undergraduates and, unlike others, we are determined that this remains in place,” it said.
Urging the party faithful to put its faith in Labour, Mr Gilmore warned, on February 3, of Fianna Fáil’s and Fine Gael’s “Celtic Tory consensus that embraces austerity at any price” and said “budgets must be based on surgery not butchery” because extracting vast sums of money from the economy would “kill the patient”.
I could go on but you probably get the point. They say that political parties campaign in poetry, but it is more correct to say that Labour campaigned in unashamed lies.
There has been a succession of humiliating u-turns in the nine months since the party joined its “Celtic Tory” partners in government, and promptly abandoned its constituency, but the recent spectacle of senior ministers squirming as they attempt to rationalise their duplicity has been truly grotesque.
The controversy concerning the mysterious briefing document, signalling an imminent 2% increase in VAT levels, that surfaced in Germany last week, is a case in point.
One by one, senior ministers were sent out to pooh-pooh the ridiculous notion that the VAT increase was a fait accompli.
Speaking with a forked tongue on Thursday, the self-dubbed Minister for Cuts, Brendan Howlin, who works out of the Department of Finance, said; “the notion that anything has been decided is untrue”.
“The budget is a work in progress, and I’m certainly not going to discuss any potential elements of it, but I can tell you there are no decisions in relation to any element of the budget and there won’t be until the entire package is before Cabinet … I’ve no idea of the basis of discussions in the German Bundestag,” he said.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny, who had just returned from a trip to Germany where he told one audience of Berlin businessmen to “put your trust in us and we will not let you down”, said he had absolutely “no idea” how the document ended up in the Bundestag, and vehemently denied it had slipped out of his pocket while he was bowing and scraping during his visit.
“Let me confirm something to you, the Cabinet have made no decision in regard to the budget. It is on December 6. It is only after the Cabinet makes decisions that these things become a reality.
“I’m not going to comment on speculative (reports) — or comment about decisions that have not been taken by the Government at all,” he sniffed.
Both men’s credibility lies in tatters after Michael Noonan’s admission that, actually, the briefing document had come from his own department and the VAT increase would definitely form a substantial part of the crude revenue-raising measures of his first budget.
In fact, he said, the increase had already been costed and it would net the impecunious Exchequer €670m — a tad less than the €750m the state recently borrowed to repay unsecured senior bondholders in Anglo Irish Bank.
In short, it was a done deal. And Howlin and Kenny must have known that when they were sent out to play dumb, and lie about the provenance of the offending document, the preceding day.
While Brian Cowen was rightly lambasted for his woeful communication skills as his government lurched from crisis to catastrophe, members of the coalition seem to have adopted a novel approach to getting their garbled message across — say whatever nonsense enters your head, even if it completely contradicts previous statements on the very same issue, but say it with conviction and hope to God that no one notices you’re talking the proverbial while simultaneously taking the proverbial.
THE same double speak is evident in the refusal of Minister for Social Protection, Joan Burton, to deny that cuts to child benefit are now on the cards as the Government continues the peculiarly Irish practice of using an axe, instead of a scalpel, to perform surgery on a flat-lining economy.
Admitting the cutback was “up for discussion”, she was unable to even give a morsel of comfort to those struggling families who rely on the payment to make ends meet. Social protection, how are ya? Eamon Gilmore, who formerly ranted and raved about the importance of the payment to family budgets and unequivocally denied Labour would ever countenance further cutting child benefit, has been too cowardly to even make a statement on the controversy.
Instead, a spokesman for the Tánaiste said he was not going to comment on “speculation” about the mooted cut. Following the “speculation” about the VAT increase, I think we can all guess how this one is going to play out.
Labour’s pre-election slogan — Ní neart, go cur le chéile (there’s no strength without unity) — has now been exposed as the patronising guff it is.
Make no mistake, under this Government, it is predominantly students, children and the low paid who will again be targeted by ministers who say it is too hard — or they are too incompetent — to devise more equitable ways to raise the requisite levels of money that will keep the troika off our backs for another few short months.
