Farming out the pain at Farmleigh

It certainly felt like a funeral at Farmleigh as the black ministerial Mercs purred up the long, winding driveway to the stately home where the Cabinet would decide how deep to plunge the welfare knife amidst the beautiful tapestries and priceless pieces of art adorning the walls.

A few ministers stopped to unwind the windows of their expensive, taxpayer funded chauffeur-driven German cars on the way through the gates to speak breathlessly about the need for “fairness”.

Ironically, the meeting was delayed due to the fact the Finance Minister needed to urgently liaise with the EU Monetary Commissioner — a telling sign that if Irish economic sovereignty is not quite dead yet it is certainly haemorrhaging power heavily to Brussels all the time.

The Cabinet was left with the delicate task of trying to cut as much from the sickly economy as possible without actually killing it outright in the process — a deft enough job for the most gifted fiscal surgeon, and a worrying task for a collection of people who in the past have wielded the axe with all the finesse of CoCo the Clown.

The Cabinet seem to enjoy the drama of using the sumptuous setting of Farmleigh for their cuts get-togethers, maybe we were meant to applaud the fact they had sacrificed a few hours of their Bank Holiday Monday to decide how much people in the Real World would sacrifice from their family lives to try and get us out of the mess this Government did so much to exacerbate.

Shrivelled leaves drifted down onto the fleet of ministerial Mercs as the chill winds of recession swept through the trees lining the carriageway to the imposing 18th century Georgian pile, but it is the sick, old and struggling who will feel the real blast of cold from the December Budget being decided within its beautiful, opulent interior.

After their evening in the luxurious surroundings of Farmleigh it was back to Government Buildings yesterday as they prepared to take yet more slices off the lives of those who thought they had already played their part in getting us through the past 28 months of slump via levies, pay cuts and benefit reductions. Still reeling from the news of Black Thursday that €34.3 billion will be largely thrown away on Anglo Irish, it made it feel like Day One of the recession all over again.

Ministers were told that for every billion euro to be taken out of the economy in December, growth rates would fall by up to 0.5% — and lower growth means lower tax take and higher welfare rolls, which in turn leads to the need for more spending cuts and causes lower growth in a classic deflationary circle.

With more than €5bn to be sucked out of people’s lives either through higher taxes or lower spending this December and another €10bn by 2014, that’s a lot of lost growth — or “flat growth” as Mary Hanafin nonsensically called it.

As the starkly regressive unfairness of a flat rate property tax and water charging without metres loomed into view — with, undoubtedly, a tax on breathing soon to follow — the picture appeared bleaker than ever.

British PM David Cameron has ordered his ministers to cut costs by taking public transport whenever possible, and set the example himself when he flew to his first US summit with President Barack Obama on a regular business class commercial seat rather than charter a plane as was the normal practice of previous premiers.

But at least the “little people” here who will see their pensions, health care and education opportunities blighted once again can feel secure in the knowledge we still have enough cash to keep our ministerial chauffeur- driven Mercedes rolling to the gates of Farmleigh.