Your welfare is our concern — but only if you have a horse in training

SHOULD probably begin with a small apology to diligent readers. If you followed my instructions of last week, you’d have found the horsey money in the book of estimates, exactly where I said it was.

Except I said it would be around €60 million.

In fact it was just under €67 million. Instead of the horsey set taking a reduction, they actually got an increase in the money that is largely used for their prizes. And one other thing I should mention, that I hadn't realised when I was writing last week's piece: those prizes are all tax free.

So the unique situation continues where a lump of tax money is set aside, guaranteed to one small group of people, and paid out to them on a completely tax-free basis.

Clearly, the solution for people who are homeless, or who are lone parents, or who need to spend extra out of very small incomes on special diets because of health conditions, is simple. Marie Antoinette said they should eat cake.

The Fianna Fáil equivalent is that they should club together and buy a horse.

That will elevate them into an entirely different bracket. Instead of being sneered at, condescended to, and treated like dirt, they would suddenly become popular with the Government.

They'd be cared for, attended to, minded. Of course, they'd have to put up with a lot of visits from Government ministers asking them if they wanted anything extra.

Yeah, you're right. It's just not funny any more. The events of last week have finally proved one thing about this Government. Or three things. It has no political competence. It has no social concern. It has no economic vision.

It's not a government worthy of the name, just a collection of chancers, hucksters, and charlatans.

I hope you'd accept that I don't normally go in for name-calling (I know Willie O'Dea doesn't accept it, but he's always been better at dishing it out than taking it).

But it's very hard to read the book of estimates, without coming to the conclusion that it was put together by people who don't think and don't care. Government is difficult.

It's about difficult choices, often, and requires a lot of careful thought. I don't agree with the notion (actually it's more propaganda than anything else) that spending is somehow out of control and we have to cut our cloth accordingly.

But even if one were to assume that this is a time for cuts, only the most incompetent and uncaring government will always settle for the easy cuts.

What are easy cuts? They are cuts that don't require management, that don't involve the hard work of thinking through consequences.

Cuts that can be made by drawing a pen through a line, without having to worry about staff or industrial relations or other knock-ons that distort policy. Lazy and incompetent politicians make that kind of cut.

That's why, for example, aid to the developing world has been frozen (as a percentage of our national wealth). Even though we are committed to increasing that aid (which goes to the poorest of the world's poor) on a percentage basis until we reach an agreed UN target, who's going to notice if we decide, despite all our wealth, to freeze it?

The UN will be too polite to mention it, the world's poor are too busy dying to rise up in anger, and the people who do care in Ireland find it impossible ever to get more than a few column inches in the newspapers. Nobody's going to march on the Dáil over it. And you can do it at the stroke of a pen.

But it's so incompetent, isn't it? You know instinctively that managers who always reach for the easy option are going to have no answers at all if the going ever gets really rough.

The Department of Social and Family Affairs has a slogan: "Your welfare is our concern." And yet when they're told to make savings, their real concern becomes immediately obvious. Their instinctive reaction is to ask who won't protest.

Who will be powerless and voiceless? Who, in short, doesn't really matter? And so they take their pens (probably quill pens in their case) and draw lines though tiny little payments that make the difference between what you might call tolerable hardship and abject misery.

MAJOR curbs on the back to education allowance, ending the transitional payment for families beginning to earn over the income limit for certain social welfare payments, restricting access to supplementary welfare rent allowance these are just a few of what are already known as the "savage sixteen" of social welfare cuts announced last week.

At least we know who they're not concerned about. Lone parents in particular are being squeezed and punished by these cuts, revealing that a Dickensian and poor law mindset is still alive in that department.

Its hapless minister, Mary Coghlan, has been totally unable to offer any rationale for the cuts, other than to say that she was asked for €58 million in cuts and that's what she delivered.

€58 million? On the day the Government allocated more than 40,000 million in spending, somebody decided that the most vulnerable and powerless people in Ireland should subsidise the rest of us.

The horsey set get their €67 million in subsidies, the lone parents and the coeliacs get their €58 million in cuts. "Your welfare is our concern but only if you have a horse."

And if in years to come the children who are being told that the conditions in which they live are of no concern to the Government stick two fingers up to the rest of us, won't we all be shocked? I said there was no competence, no concern, and no vision about the book of estimates.

The changing face of the Irish economy means than Ireland needs to be working on a new industrial development strategy, a coherent regional strategy, investment in our people and rapid resolution of our infrastructural problems.

The continuing failure of this Government to invest in infrastructure to the extent necessary is dragging our economy down, just as much as the reckless policy decisions they made in the late 1970s and early 1980s did.

The total capital spending next year, thanks to the estimates, will be €69m lower than in 2002, even before inflation is taken into account. In the 2002 budget Charlie McCreevy set a target of 5% of GDP for capital spending he is now some €1,500m behind that.

There's been a lot of speculation about talk over the weekend about how Michael Smith's might have been trying to destabilise the leadership of the Government with his antics over the Hanly report. Whatever his intentions, his challenge to the Taoiseach's authority failed, this time at least.

It's a pity he didn't plunge the whole Fianna Fáil party into a crisis. On the basis of this book of estimates, With its meanness and lack of vision (and I haven't even mentioned the extra €91 million in stealth taxes), the sooner someone brings this rotten house of cards down, the better. They'd be doing us all a favour.