They keep on treating us like eejits

HERE’S a piece of spin. It’s actually a piece of political guff, from a master of the genre. It mightn’t look like it on the surface, but it shows how devious and cunning its author is. And how much he deserves to be watched.

It's taken from Gerard Barry's This Week programme on RTÉ on Sunday. Our Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, is talking (I've shortened it a bit, but I haven't changed it in any meaningful way):

"Charlie McCreevy and I, the two of us in particular, faced the onslaught I said continually there would be no cutbacks in health and I was berated for that.

"I'm not in the business of telling eminent economists how wrong they were but some of them said we were going to be a billion of a deficit, others said €800 million; we all the time said those figures aren't correct. Other eminent people, or at least those who think they are, said that we were going to cut back hundreds of millions on health. I stated that not alone were we going to spend the full figure in the revised estimates but we were going to spend more than that, and the fact is that we have

"They said we were going to have a deficit at the end of the year of a billion pounds. They said we were going to reduce massively the money in health. The year is over. I'm too long around to go back and start naming how people were wrong, though I'm glad they don't look after my money, not that I have much of it, but the fact of the matter is we came in on target"

You know what that means, don't you? Bertie was right all along, and the critics were wrong. Those critics (he used to call them creeping Jesuses, but now they just think they're eminent) were predicting a massive deficit leading to cutbacks all over the place. But Bertie and Charlie knew different. He could name the critics who got it wrong, but what'd be the point?

Hello? I think he ought to name all these awful people who were predicting a massive deficit, don't you? One of them was so brash as to tell the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party at their jamboree in Killarney in September that "the public purse strings will be pulled even tighter in 2003 to keep spending increases to 9%. So far this year spending is 18.9% ahead of 2001. So next year's target represents a sharp slowing down in spending."

This "eminent expert" was none other than the Minister for Finance himself.

A "source close to him" told all the newspapers the day before the Killarney meeting that "Mr McCreevy will be sending a very strong message about a strict pruning of public finances. He will be giving it straight to TDs that the situation will be very tight indeed. The recent cutbacks will be nothing compared to what will be expected next year."

Then there was the eminent organisation that published an eminent set of figures indicating that "the Exchequer could be 1.2 billion in deficit by the end of this year, well above the latest official forecast of a 750 million shortfall."

Despite recent cutbacks, current spending is still running far ahead of target, while tax revenue remains well below expectations, according to the organisation's statement for the first 10 months of the year, published at the end of October and reported in all the newspapers.

And what was that eminent organisation? Why, it was none other than the Department of Finance itself. Its Exchequer returns published around four weeks before the Budget forecast that the deficit problem was deepening all the time.

I could quote half a dozen other examples. The Taoiseach, the Minister for Finance, the Tánaiste and the ubiquitous Minister for Justice all issued statements or gave interviews in the run-up to the Budget justifying massive cuts in spending because the public finances were out of control.

And what's all this about so-called eminent people predicting they would be cutting health spending? Did some eminent people circulate a memo to Government ministers shortly after the election demanding cutbacks? Why, no.

As a matter of fact, it was the Minister for Finance again, you might recall, who circulated a secret memo demanding massive cuts in non-pay health spending.

That memo, thankfully, was leaked to the Sunday Tribune, giving rise to the suspicion (let's put it no more strongly than that) that the minister had known a lot more before the election than he was letting on.

These are the eminent people referred to by the Taoiseach in his interview designed to create the impression that white is black and black is white.

The people who called for the cutbacks were himself and his own.

You probably think it's a bit daft for the Taoiseach now to be telling us that he and Charlie McCreevy braved the onslaught and faced down the critics. After all, the onslaught came after they made the cutbacks. Nobody called for cutbacks except themselves. And the reason they called for them was because they believed, and told the rest of us, that there was going to be a massive deficit.

In other words, they were wrong on all scores wrong, wrong, wrong. They were wrong about the deficit they predicted, wrong about the cuts they needed, wrong about the policies they followed. They couldn't have got it more wrong.

So where's the logic in going on radio to announce that they got it right and the critics got it wrong?

Here's the logic. Tell someone a whopper often enough, make it big enough, and sound sincere enough, and people will start to think it's true. That's the first rule of a certain kind of propaganda. And we're in for a lot of that kind of propaganda.

These people, our Government, have made swingeing cuts in essential social spending because they were afraid of a deficit and weren't willing to face it any other way. Elderly people, disabled people, homeless people, young people who can't afford a home of their own, and countless others will suffer for several years to come because of those cuts.

And now we're expected to believe that the Government that made the cuts didn't forecast and broadcast the deficit? Next they'll start telling us again, as they did before the Budget, that they're not really cuts at all.

They just can't stop treating us like eejits, can they? They'll even allow us all to get involved in a controversy about whether the Taoiseach can drive or not, as if it mattered a damn. The only thing that really matters is that we're supposed to swallow all the guff about eminent people forecasting gloom and doom because if we do, it will help them to get away once more with the callous and selfish cutbacks they have imposed.

The one thing we do know now, with the publication of the surplus, is that the cutbacks weren't necessary in the first place. But some of us less than eminent people have been telling you that for months.

Fergus Finlay is chef de cabinet of the Labour Party.