Happy endings for all in Finance’s fantastic fairyland

UNDER-BREATH Budget Day gripes were plentiful, but public protest was left to the country’s third-level students who converged on the Dáil in a noisy, animated but — apart from a few expletive-peppered slogans — impeccably-behaved show of disgruntlement.

Usual suspects Cutback McCreevy, Arrogance Ahern and Hardship Harney all received a verbal bashing on a day when bricks-and-mortar spending on colleges fell by almost 50%, but the students’ ire was carefully targeted and they remembered their manners, to the point of publicly thanking gardaí for their help.

They better hope the guards were too overcome with flattery to think of rounding up a few new suspects. A hastily-hammered-together coffin used to symbolise cutbacks killing colleges looked suspiciously like a wardrobe. Beware landlords bearing inventories.

Then again, the haphazard prop, created by a student body rich in construction engineers, looked close to falling apart, providing perhaps the most vivid example of what happens when you starve education of funds.

Three little words summed up the attitude that seeped through Charlie McCreevy’s budget, and lurrve wasn’t one of them.

In Fine Gael Finance spokesman Richard Bruton’s eyes, McCreevy took on decidedly Simpsonian characteristics and, having perpetuated an act of devious duplicity on the public, baldly paraded his crimes in front of them declaring: “Eat my shorts.”

Indeed, he suggested McCreevy had notions of a screen career himself. Given the minister’s reprieve for film tax relief, Bruton felt he was hoping for his own seven-part saga “Budget Day”.

In which case, the opening lines might also be borrowed from Bart: “I didn’t do anything. Nobody saw it. You can’t prove anything.”

Protecting intellectual property is all very well, but McCreevy’s vice-like grip on the details of his Budget speech verged on the paranoid.

Copies of the document were handed out at select locations around Leinster House as the minister cleared his throat, but they had to be read on the spot until he sat down again.

“Under no circumstances may members of the media move freely around the Leinster House complex in possession of the Budget documentation,” warned a blood-chilling edict, compliance being policed by strategically-placed security staff.

It may be the only chance McCreevy gets to flex his Gestapo muscle, however. His Budget cut the kitty for the Secret Service by 8%.

“Niamh is single and has a five-year-old son. Niamh works as a hairdresser and earns 24,000. She will gain 240 from the Budget.” So chirped one of the narratives in storybook-style Budget documentation in which everyone had a happy ending.

Alas, her extra 240, or 4.61 per week, works out at a 1% income increase for the coming year, against estimated inflation of 2.5%. Just as well she lives in a storybook. She’s going to need a fairy godmother.