Time to put an end to auction politics and empty poll promises
Sadly, there doesn’t appear to be room in the ‘fiscal space’ debate to allow the issue even to be discussed.
It’s the same absence of accountability and lack of responsibility that is driving our politicians, almost to a man and a woman.
They are writing cheques with their mouths during these pre-election days that they will have no way of cashing.
The lack of accountability corrupts everything it touches.
And it will ultimately make us all overly cynical that we will be a society in name only.
Whilst some of the promises being made are so unachievable that they will never see the light of day, there are others that are luxuries that may well be implemented.
If they are implemented, it will come at a cost. The supreme irony is that while the taxpayer will be fooled into believing the promises, the cost of these will also be borne by the taxpayer.
It’s a spiral that needs to stop. Now is as good a time as any. We need to be able to trust our politicians.
We need to be able to trust our leaders and we need to be able to trust our government.
The issue is just how can we, when politicians as a class of people, tell us untruths and half-truths as a matter of form.
Unfortunately, the absence of accountability and the avoidance of responsibility is not unique to politicians.
It is to be found across the entire State, from the top of the civil service, to the banks, commerce, and the organs of the State, including the gardaí, the HSE and its off shoot ‘partners’ and other organisations.
In the last few weeks, the terrible issues associated with the HSE and a care home in the south east were writ large.
However, even a slight scraping of the proverbial skin of other organisations is likely to throw up other failures that were hitherto hidden.
After the last election Pat Rabbitte implied, in a sort of joking way, that politicians making un-doable promises, or ones they had no intention of keeping during an election campaign, should not be taken seriously, because that is what politicians tended to do during elections.
What he forgot to tell us is how voters are expected to tell the difference between truth and fiction. The end result is that comments by politicians end up sounding all the same.
So we have Michael Noonan, the current Minister for Finance, telling us at one stage that he has a ‘fiscal space’ of €12 billion.
The other parties are saying something in the region of €8 billion and the Fiscal Council is saying it is much less because it believes that the rest of the money is already committed, or will be.
They all cannot be correct. In the absence of a knowledgeable referee we really have no idea what the truth really is.
It is disingenuous to say the least. We as a people have had a very tough time since 2008. Despite what Enda might say in Davos, or elsewhere, the vast bulk of people did not party.
Yet they surely paid the price for mistakes of others, whether those mistakes were wilful or otherwise.
They also paid the price for others. In simple terms, the people of Ireland did not do the crime but they surely did the time. Our heads are beginning to just get above the waterline.
The last thing we need now is for government, and the other political parties, to risk it all in their bids to retain or secure power.
That they are putting the country at risk is beyond question. In the last few days, stocks globally have nosedived.
They have dropped in Ireland amid fears for the global economy. Banking stock losses have been particularly elevated.
Ireland is highly dependent on the rest of the world for virtually everything. A cold in Shanghai or in San Francisco could end up as pneumonia in Ireland.
Can we not just get away from auction politics for once?
Our economy needs it. There are huge risks and we ignore them at our peril.
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