Broken promises and Budget pledges go in the spin cycle

WATCH out for spin. It’s all around you. Some of our politicians have been spinning madly this past week about a whole lot of stuff that doesn’t deserve it.

It would be so much better if they just told us the truth.

First of all, Gerry Adams. I listened to him on the radio on Sunday, expressing his sympathy for Ann McCabe, the widow of the last policeman to be murdered by the IRA in Ireland. He understood what she was going through, he said, and many of his own friends and family had to go through the same thing, watching people who had killed their loved ones go free.

When the interviewer, Richard Crowley, pressed him as to whether he had raised the issue of the killers' release, Adams became irritated and tried to move the interview on. He did in the end admit, in the most cursory fashion possible, that it had been raised in discussions. He never referred to the murderers involved as anything but "the people charged with the killing," as if it might be possible to view them as innocent.

It was probably always going to come to this. The Government was quite possibly always going to have to renege on the solemn commitments it had given on brutal murder of Gerry McCabe. But there is only one reason for that. It is because Gerry Adams has insisted, on behalf of the IRA, that the war will not end until these men are free.

It is not just on his wish list in the negotiations it's a bottom line. There will be no settlement; the IRA will not decommission; there will be no standing down of the army while murderers remain in jail.

So it's essentially a done deal. The Government, at Gerry Adams' insistence, has already agreed to it. Why must he avoid saying so? Why must the Tánaiste and other ministers go around pretending that it hasn't been considered yet, and won't be considered until we're all at peace with each other? It's part of the package, and they know it. They're just afraid to say it, for fear we would think worse of them.

Oddly enough, the Taoiseach has given the only straightforward answers on this issue, although this is the first time that he has been straightforward on the matter.

Giving a straight answer is usually the Taoiseach's last recourse (and if you don't believe me, read the Dáil record when he's there), so when he does give straight answers, we can assume in his case that what he's doing is actually a more sophisticated bit of spinning.

But he was asked a straight question in the Dáil last Wednesday, and gave a straight answer. Not once, but twice he said that if there was to be a comprehensive agreement in Northern Ireland, the release of Jerry McCabe's murderers would have to be part of it.

His calculation is simple enough. He has agreed to it, and he wants to take the heat now, so when there is a comprehensive agreement, the shock of so many broken promises won't tarnish the agreement.

The agreement itself is the other area where the politicians have been spinning madly. Will they, won't they? One step forward, then two back. Of course, there's going to be an agreement, and all of its participants know its details.

But there's one thing you have to remember about the parties of the extremes, now ironically at the centre of all our attention. Parties like the DUP and Sinn Féin never talk to us, only to themselves.

When Gerry Adams or Ian Paisley speak, they have only one audience in mind their own supporters and members. The wider public has to read between the lines because the messages are all geared towards convincing the faithful that no principles have been abandoned, that every compromise is a victory.

Bear that in mind as you listen to the insults they hurl at each other as they get closer to announcing the terms of the agreement, and you'll realise that the purpose of the insults is only to reassure their own.

The politics of peace in Northern Ireland has moved beyond what they used to call the zero sum game I only win if you lose but the language is still stuck in that time warp.

AND finally, more spinning. The budget. Good, wasn't it? Well, yes it was, in many ways, though it was a real cop-out in others. I don't want to be a begrudger, so let me say that I was genuinely impressed when I heard Brian Cowen announce in the Dáil that he was introducing a multi-annual funding package to improve services for people with disabilities, and that it would be worth 900 million, of which 600 million would be current spending.

It wasn't until I got to the principal features of the budget that I realised he was once again guilty of the same thing over-selling a decent enough announcement. If you look at the published documents, you realise that what he is actually proposing to do, in relation to the range of services urgently needed by people with intellectual disability, is to introduce €50 million worth of new services in each of the years 20062009. That's a total of €200 million, and nothing like €600 million.

Of course, if you introduce new services that cost €50 million in 2006, those same services have to be kept going in each of the following years. It is the cost of keeping services going that makes the money add up, rather than the cost of introducing new services. And the minister is assuming that the people providing those services will never need a pay increase in the four years he is providing for. If they do, and he only provides an extra €50 million each year, the new services introduced next year will be under-funded almost immediately.

Now, don't get me wrong €50 million a year extra is not a bad allocation. But the budget statement makes it clear that the total allocated will create, according to the Government's calculations (and they're probably an overestimate) 1,290 new residential places by 2009.

But it was the Government itself that produced a report last week that said that 1,893 places were going to be needed in that period. The national intellectual disability database actually said that demand for full-time residential services for people with intellectual disability is now at its highest level since recording began.

So why over-egg the pudding? Yes, Minister Cowen is making a commitment his predecessor always refused to make.

But the waiting lists tell the story of the damage done and the opportunities missed by seven years of ignoring the issue.

What is happening now is a long-overdue attempt to begin to undo that damage. All the spinning in the world won't change that fact.