The financial straw that broke the electorates’ banks

IT was the final, bitter, whiplash goodbye from the Two Brians.

They would soon turn on each other, but for now they had unfinished business with the most vulnerable in society to occupy their time.

Blind, widowed and disabled pensioners were among those turned over for a few meagre euro, while the minimum wage slaves were shaken-down for the sake of a quid an hour. But we were all in this together, why, ministers would even give-up one of their fleet of private jets — eventually — and in solidarity with the basement wage cut to €7.65 an hour, the Taoiseach would snip his minimum hourly pay to just €102.88.

The European bailiffs were at the doors of Government Buildings demanding possession of assets like Bord Gáis, and ESB and the Brians were panicking as they scrambled through the wreckage, desperate to find ways of paying the massive credit card bills they’d run-up with the EU before getting a final eviction notice from the electorate.

Light relief was as hard to find as compassion in Brian Lenihan’s 43-minute assault on civil society, but then there is always something comic about the Greens. There they sat, all six of them looking like they were wondering how on earth it had come to this. We probably won’t see them huddled together like that again until they begin their Fás restart course in the New Year after voters have delivered their verdict on them.

Paul “Go-Go” Gogarty was getting particularly agitated as Fine Gael’s Michael Noonan laid into the Government. Go-Go kept barking and whimpering with inane interruptions like a mangy terrier with tourette’s syndrome nipping at Noonan’s heals before being slapped down by the Blueshirt bulldozer who has suddenly emerged as the deadpan assassin of the Dáil.

Noonan then turned his fire onto Lenihan for taking €10 in children’s allowance off the first and second child, but doubling the cut to €20 for the third born.

“Did you get beaten up on the way home from school by a third child, or something?” Noonan enquired as even the FF benches started to smile.

Noonan then drove a coach and horses through the vagaries of Lenihan’s speech, its casual cruelty and improbable figures. He accused Lenihan of “faking- it up”, well, it sounded like “faking-it up”, anyway.

The barbs were clearly hitting home inside the chamber as anger outside threatened to spiral out of control, tension was so high some demonstrators set on a man in the mistaken belief he was pro-cuts independent TD Jackie Healy Rae, as garda attack dog squads were rushed to defend Leinster House’s main gate while the west side of the parliamentary compound was put into lock-down.

Back in the chamber, a grinning Ivor Callely was the last government senator to leave the distinguished visitors gallery. Maybe the delay was because he could not remember which home he should go to — the one just up the road, or the lucrative holiday one in West Cork he claimed €81,000 in travel expenses for?

All the while Lenihan kept trying to pretend this was not the fabled Budget From Hell, but rather it was The Budget From Hello Magazine — all soft focus and fuzzy.

Businesses weren’t going to the wall, and families weren’t being pushed toward poverty, oh no, they were just “working off the excesses of the boom” — a bit like the Atkins Diet.

He insisted we were merely getting over the “Bubble years” — like all this was a lovely big fluffy towel after a relaxing bath.

Lenihan had the sheer nerve to claim slashing the minimum wage would “incentivise people back to work”, er, what bloody work? And those on the minimum wage spend every euro they have because they desperately need every euro they have.

Mr Lenihan then claimed the economic and financial disaster the country has been crushed under was all the fault of a “vicious circle” Ireland had got caught up in. Well, yeah Brian, but its full name was the vicious golden circle at Anglo, the one your Government pawned the nation to bail out and poured €34.3bn — and the next generation’s prosperity — down the toilet to save, remember?

Lenihan was taking none of the blame for himself or his three other cack-handed budgets, of course, but in a telling foretaste of the final death-throw act of this Government yet to play out, he certainly shovelled the shame onto his predecessor as Finance Minister, a certain Mr B Cowen. Though not mentioned by name, Lenihan again and again lamented that property tax breaks had not been reigned-in before he took over in 2008 and how dangerous it had been to let the boom get out of control.

The body language between the two Brians told its own sorry story and was as frozen as the ice clinging to the Dáil windows. They barely acknowledged one another when Lenihan took his seat at the beginning of the speech, and Cowen only offered him the meekest of applause at its end.

It is now clear Mr Lenihan’s final cut as finance minister will be to plunge the knife into the Taoiseach’s back within weeks.