Budget 2020: Brexit threat defines the ground rules

Despite Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s weekend bullishness when he said that a record 2.3m people are at work and that the unemployment rate stands at 5% and continues to fall, today’s budget, one of the tightly choreographed melodramas of the political year, might be described as a cross between one of Venice’s masked balls and a dull episode of a TV blind date exploitation fest.

Most people at a masked ball know who everyone else is despite the faux mystery contrived to facilitate something beyond the everyday, maybe a frisson of sexual fantasy.

Just as someone watching a blind date show or one of those jungle dramas where impossibly attractive people, physically at least, are thrown together in a lather of lust might innocently imagine they are in uncharted waters, fantasy, even proxy fantasy is allowed free rein.

Wishful thinking intrudes while reality is put on hold... at least until Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe’s well-flagged reveal in mid-afternoon winnows the possible from the letter-to-Santa fantasies.

Back in the day, when masked balls were imagined risque, budget confidentiality was taken seriously. So much so that Phil Hogan, just confirmed as the EU’s incoming trade commissioner, had to resign as junior finance minister in 1995 over leaks to the media. Such a resignation might not be expected today as many of this afternoon’s measures have been released even if not in precise and committed detail.

One suggests that the help-to-buy scheme for first-time house-buyers will be modified so “couples who can already well afford to buy” will not be unfairly subsidised. This scheme offered tax rebates of up to €20,000 to first-time buyers buying a new build worth up to €500,000 and is under review.

Should that ceiling be lowered it would be a recognition of reality. It might also open a Pandora’s box. After all, it seems to challenge the housing scandal’s core issue — the role of property rights in supply and cost of housing. Final judgment must be deferred until the relevant finance bill eventually passes through the Oireachtas but the proposal seems a very welcome step in the right direction.

The budget is to an unhealthy but unavoidable degree framed by Brexit uncertainties. Yesterday’s warning from the Dairy Council of Northern Ireland, though not directly related, tries to measure the impact of a hard-deal tsunami. It warned the sector is “facing a crisis of epic proportions”.

Tariffs on raw milk and finished dairy products exported from the North to elsewhere in Europe could hit €380m and “wipe out the industry”. And yet the Brextremists persist in their lemming march towards the fabled sunlit uplands.

Before the sun sets today on those uplands, the annual budget Punch and Judy will be in full flow turning serious melodrama into soap opera. Whatever is proposed will be derided by those with a platform but without responsibility.

Might it be, as Brexit looms, reassuring if all political parties showed a degree of solidarity on measures offered to fend off the worst consequences of Brexit? If they cannot do that then it does not augur well for the collective political responsibility and steadiness a hard Brexit will demand.