In troubling times globally let’s focus and budget for our children
T SEEMS almost trivial to be talking about the budget. But on this day week, next Tuesday, from the moment you turn on your radio or open your Irish Examiner in the morning, until you lay your weary head on the pillow, you’ll be bombarded. Predictions and leaks all morning, analysis of what difference it will make to anything in the afternoon.
There was a time when all this mattered, when it did really seem to make a difference. Not any more, sadly. But why do I say it seems almost trivial? I’ll give you three reasons.
Firstly, as I’m writing this, there are scenes of incredible police brutality on the television. As someone said on Facebook during the day, it’s not terrorists who are being batoned into submission, or mad anarchist protestors. It’s people trying to vote. In Girona, and Barcelona. Quintessentially democratic European cities.
As you watch what is going on, it seems clear the Spanish government has made a terrible mistake. Perhaps the same kind of mistake that the government of Northern Ireland made, almost a half-century ago, when it allowed the RUC to baton charge civil rights marchers in Derry. That single incident made the cause of civil rights in a small region of the world international news.
But more than that, it represented the sewing of a seed. Watching the police brutality in Barcelona and other towns and cities, it seems certain that the same seed has been sewn there. The Spanish government didn’t have to stop the vote, any more than they have to recognise the vote. By their actions, they have forced a decision on Catalonian independence to the top of the agenda, with all the uncertainty that that will bring across Europe.
The Spanish police are now beating up Catalan firefighters. This is an absolute shocker. #CatalanReferendum https://t.co/zJeTATJQxJ
— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) October 1, 2017
But also as I write this, the president of the United States has spent several days sneering at the people of a little Caribbean island. Puerto Rico is smaller than Ireland and was devastated by Hurricane Maria. From the tone of his tweets, it seems clear that Donald Trump didn’t even know that everyone born in Puerto Rico is American by birth. I reckon he believed it was another one of those places, populated by people with Mexican-coloured skin and Spanish accents, that deserved to have a wall built around it.
There doesn’t seem to be any bottom to the callousness and self-absorption of the leader of the free world. The hardship being endured by people who he was elected to represent appears to be a matter of complete indifference to him. You’ll see it when he goes to Puerto Rico this week, because you’ll see how he preens himself in the middle of other people’s misery.
The third reason our budget seems trivial right now is because our politicians and policy-makers are playing at the margins.
You’ve heard the dreaded expression “fiscal space”. Give or take a little, it means the amount of money the government has to spend on new stuff on budget day. And give or take a little more, the total amount of that availability will be around a billion.
A billion sounds like a lot, but the total amount that Ireland spends next year won’t be far short of 60bn. What that means is that essentially, 59bn of the 60bn is pretty well decided long before the budget. Most of the items in the budget are fixed, and fixed in stone.
Roughly speaking, if you’re paying about the average amount of tax, around half of what you contribute will go on running the health service and repaying the national debt. The other half will be spent of the education system, a wide range of social programmes, and keeping us safe in our homes. It’s all pretty well spoken for.
There are only two ways that can be changed. The first is if there’s a politician willing to say that because we need something done, he or she is going to raise a new tax to do it. The second is if there’s a politician willing to say that there’s a real crisis out there, that matters right now more than anything else, and therefore that crisis is going to be the only priority in the budget.
That means there won’t be tax breaks this year. It means that as much as they want to, they’re not going to give the water charges money back this year. It means they’re not going to keep the low Vat rate on hotel beds. It means cutting back on the tens of millions given to the horse and greyhound industry. They’re the sort of decisions that you make if you really believe there’s something more important. Something we really need to invest in.
And there is. It’s children. We need to finally make the decision that this is one priority we can no longer ignore.
This is the first time in the history of the State that a minister for finance will stand up in the Dáil on Budget Day while there are 3,000 homeless children in the State. That has never happened before, and I’m guessing it will guarantee that they are mentioned in his speech. And of course, they must be. Among all the priority needs that children have, theirs is the most acute, and the most shaming.
But they’re not alone. There are children at risk because child protection services are under-funded. There are teenagers self-harming with no recourse to decent mental health supports. There are children dropping out of school early, children afraid to face the school day, children being denied the progress that ought to be possible for them, because we’d rather have endless debate on the needs of the the higher education sector than admit that our primary sector is grossly under-funded.
And when it comes to giving even younger children a decent start in life, we’re way behind the curve. We’re right down at the bottom of the international league tables in terms of our investment in early education. Early education is seen internationally as one of the keys to breaking the cycle of poverty — wouldn’t you think that a country that has one-in-nine of its children living in consistent poverty would finally start to put a value on the things that can break that cycle?
That would take determination on Budget Day — and tough choices. It would take a minister to say children are going to matter this year. Whatever’s available is going to go to them. Not hoteliers, not racehorse owners, or farmers or car owners. But children. Starting with the children in most acute need, but little by little building a society that values all its children.
It wouldn’t be easy to take on a battle like that. You couldn’t even fix all the things that need to be fixed in one year — although the cost of making primary education genuinely free to every child in the state, as one example, is absurdly small. But if next Tuesday were to be remembered as the day the Government brought in a children’s budget, it would be remembered for all the right reasons. And none of them would be trivial.
