Lest we forget the bad old ’80s

MY father is of a generation old enough to have regaled us spoilt city brats with ‘béal bocht’ stories about having to walk to school in bare feet carrying hot potatoes to keep his hands warm.

I often wonder what today’s fathers’ standard story of childhood hardship will be. The best one I’ve seen so far was in a newspaper cartoon a couple of years ago. In it, a father was telling his son that when he was only a slip of a boy he had to get off the couch, walk all the way over to the television and switch the channel before returning to the couch again.

Soon, even the collective memory of that impoverished past will itself be confined to the past. Even the raw memories of the Supabus generation of the 1980s, who emigrated en masse to England and the US, are now only footnotes.

Besides the blip of 2001/2002 (and a blip is all it was), ministers have more or less been warbling on an almost daily basis the famous Harold MacMillan’s that ‘we have never had it so good’. We have come a long way since dire warnings of ‘doom and gloom’ and ‘living beyond our means as a nation’.

We have come a long way when a Minister for Finance presents a Book of Estimates that allows for a stomping great €2.5 billion increase in spending and the consensus is that it’s conservative and cautious.

Wealth is assumed nowadays in almost a catechistic way - was; is; always will be. In 1980 and 1981 FF and FG ministers for finance were confronted with the unenviable question: what rabbit can I pull from the hat to keep our heads above water?

Nowadays, government ministers resort to the tired old trick of comparing everything to the bad old days of 1997. They have the comfort of picking out any number of juicy reports telling us how fortunate we are.

Brian Cowen made a very impressive Estimates debut on Thursday. There was no razzmatazz but he had command and authority. In one sense, he has the potential to be another Gordon Brown, without his apparent cut-throat rivalry (whatever leadership ambitions Cowen might have, he doesn’t wear them on his sleeve).

Cowen didn’t crow about the muscular economy; he merely laid out the information in a matter of fact way. There’s no doubt that he was dealt a brilliant hand. This year’s projected deficit of €2.8 million will be nothing like that. The current forecast is for only €700,000 and the country may break even.

So where lies the problem then? There’s a line in a Tom Waits song that sums up the predicament this Government faces. It goes: “I know a place where a Royal Flush will never beat a pair.”

For this FF-PD coalition the writing started to appear on the wall in the June elections. Its unprecedented response to that clearly shows that they realise that this isn’t just a bit of mid-termism. The old maxim that a rising tide lifts all boats just doesn’t work any more.

There was a time when fiscal policy was all about economic survival. The game has moved on since then and there has been a fundamental change of political theme and of political expectations. Slowly, it has dawned on the Government that simply droning on about how well we are doing is becoming a dialogue of the deaf.

And so, for the first time in several years, this Estimates speech didn’t dwell on the macro picture and instead concentrated on the specific problem areas like Health, Education, Social Welfare and - putting Cowen’s own mark on it - the rights of people with disabilities.

When somebody (George Lee in fact) put it to Cowen that he was being cautious, the minister sparkled back that Lee’s critique would at least dispel the suggestion that he was trying to buy the next election.

But he is a politician after all and that’s exactly what politicians are programmed to do. The election campaign has started but this time round it will be fought in the spirit of Tiny Tim rather than Ebeneezer Scrooge.

‘Health cuts hurt the old, the sick and the handicapped’ ran the FF slogan of the late 1980s. In a key passage of his speech this week, Cowen set the 2007 Election version of that: “The Estimates should reflect our ability to spend money on the less well off, the marginalised, the sick, the young, the elderly.”

Ah, I feel a strong wave of nostalgia washing over me.