Pensioners’ handout does not conceal the political bungling

ONE often hears the saying that “the law is an ass”. After this week, who could argue with that? On the one hand, we had the dangerous driving case against MEP Avril Doyle thrown out because of the delay in bringing it to court.

She had an accident in March, 2002, and a summons was issued that September. She was to appear in court on February 21, 2003, but her legal representative stated that she did not receive the summons, so the case was struck out.

A second summons was served on her in January 2004 to appear in court in April, but again she did not appear and a bench warrant was issued for her arrest. She was in Strasbourg at the European parliament and her solicitors accepted full responsibility for the mix-up in not informing the court. A further date was set for this week, when the case was thrown out.

If it had been heard last April, it would have been over two years since the accident and, in the opinion of Judge Anne Watkin, more than two years is “well in excess of what is acceptable”.

That certainly seems a reasonable conclusion and she has done us all a favour in highlighting the procrastination of the legal profession, which has been allowed to drag out its business, especially at the tribunals. The Doyle case is symbolic because politicians are just as involved in dragging things out in a way that has made a veritable ass of the law.

Mary Harney announced during the week that money taken off pensioners illegally would not be returned. In just about any walk of life, if you take something from somebody illegally, you are expected to make restitution.

“It was illegal to take it,” Mary admitted, “but there is no obligation to pay it all back”.

The Government has rushed through legislation retroactively, justifying what was withheld in the past and authorising the State to withhold such money legally in future. In essence, people who get a non-contributory pension from the State get the money to provide for themselves. Those pensions are not enough to cover the cost of nursing homes, so the State pays that cost and deducts 80% of the pension. In other words, the State takes over the cost of the nursing home and gives the patients 20% of their pension for other expenses. Maybe it is not very much, but that’s a different argument.

The Government’s actions this week amount to an admission that it fouled up in its legislation when giving everybody over 70 a medical card. It did not realise that the legal groundwork had not been done to withhold the bulk of a State pension as a kind of contribution to the cost of the nursing home, even though this had been going on since 1976.

There was little complaint about the practice for over a quarter of a century, and the practice has now been regularised by the Oireachtas with little fuss. The rumpus was stoked by the legal profession, which possibly saw a bit of business at the expense of taxpayers, who provide the richest pickings for legal vultures. Nobody should be fooled that this was about preventing the introduction of the principle of retroactive legislation. That is already long established. Neither was it about the rights of patients in nursing homes.

People who are not going to get all the money that was deducted from them are not being unfairly treated just because they are denied the chance to exploit a legal loophole. They are going to get up to €2,000 each. Survivors of those who are dead get nothing back and those who will have money deducted in future will get nothing either.

In a sense, the €2,000 is like conscience money, except in this instance it is being paid as a distraction - to take the spotlight off the Government for its failure to act once the problem was first recognised as early as 2002.

As usual, the politicians waited until they could no longer avoid facing up to their foul-up. If the politicians were paying the money out of their own pockets, they might learn from their ineptitude. Instead, the taxpayer has to foot the bill.

While nobody should begrudge that money to the pensioners, we should not allow ourselves to be deceived.

THIS is really a €40m distraction to obscure the Government’s chronic procrastination. It has, for instance, taken some of the spotlight off Martin Cullen and the Leech controversy. The Dáil has now risen for the holidays and he will hope the storm dies down over the next six weeks. The public are paying a comparative fortune for what? For him to employ a spindoctor to puff up his ego or boost his political image?

This is the man who saddled the State with costs that have now gone over €60m for voting machines that have so far proved useless.

By comparison, Mary Harney’s €40m looks like a positively magnanimous gesture, even if it is part of a dangerous giveaway mentality. We should beware of giveaway politics, which so nearly bankrupted this country.

Donogh O’Malley came up with the great idea of providing free secondary education. Then Charlie Haughey came along with free travel, free TV licences, and free telephone rental for the elderly. These projects, which cost relatively little, provided a degree of comfort to elderly people who had done so much to sustain this country over previous decades.

But inept politicians then abused the giveaway mentality.

It was Haughey’s great critics who introduced the infamous Fianna Fáil manifesto of 1977. Bertie Ahern, Mary Harney and Charlie McCreevy were all part of the class of 1977 that were swept into Leinster House as part of a political landslide.

The country’s future was mortgaged with an extravagant stroke. It was the greatest political confidence trick ever pulled on the Irish people.

They promised to do away with car tax and rates on dwellings, but a new car tax was introduced, along with rates in the form of water and refuse charges.

Now, some of the architects of that confidence trick have the audacity to claim that they laid the foundations of our current prosperity. They didn’t sire the Celtic Tiger; they screwed the country. The current Government was venturing into the same area in 2001 by providing free medical cards without doing the necessary legal groundwork.

This has revived the ‘free’ culture in which people are being deluded into thinking that nobody has to pay.

A chunk of a generation was driven into exile in the 1980s. If we learned nothing else from that debacle, surely we learned that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody always has to pay.

The people who ultimately paid most for the 1977 manifesto were the hundreds of thousands of young people who were forced to emigrate and their parents who have been robbed of the opportunity of watching their grandchildren grow up in Ireland.

That realisation should be all the more poignant at this time of year.