Never has the need been greater for the qualities shown by Jim Mitchell

JIM MITCHELL was a remarkable, perhaps a unique, politician. Famous for his willingness to take risks with his own seat on behalf of his party, he also never shirked taking risky political positions.

Although he served with distinction as a minister, it was really as a backbencher and committee chairman that he made his name, and there are very few Irish politicians of whom you can honestly say that.

He had a great eye for a headline, he was honest, gutsy, original and committed. He was also great company, with the ability to laugh at himself as much as anything else. He died as he had lived, a credit to politics, to parliament, and to his party, Fine Gael.

We need more of the likes of Jim Mitchell politicians who are prepared to work for the primacy of parliament, and in turn to make parliament work as the watchdog of the people. It's never been needed more than it is now.

This Government is dangerous for your health. And your privacy. And your personal rights. And by the end of next week, it is likely to be more so, under a variety of headings. We'll know when we see the Budget, about which more later.

Any other week I would be concentrating on the deeply sinister set of measures allegedly contained in a new bill being prepared by our Minister for Justice, the man elected by the people and appointed by the Taoiseach to protect us from crime and advance a notion of equality. That's what his portfolio says anyway.

He could perhaps begin by telling us all what the law actually says about driving at excessive speed. Where does it say in our law that a garda driving a minister to a function can disregard the speed limit at will?

How come the Minister for Health can tolerate being driven at high speed at a time when the wards of hospitals he can't fund properly are full of the casualties of speeding drivers? How can we tolerate that level of hypocrisy?

But instead of ensuring that ministers are forcibly told that the law applies to them and their drivers just as much as it does to anyone else, our Minister for Justice, charged with protecting us and promoting our equality, is instead busy drawing up a series of legislative measures designed to legalise the holding of electronic information on every citizen of our republic for years.

According to the Irish Times and the facts have yet to be denied detailed personal data on every Irish citizen's phone and mobile calls, faxes, and e-mail and internet usage will be retained for up to four years under the new Bill. Why? Whose property will that information be? What will it be used for? Who will have access to it for instance, what guarantee would we have that the intelligence agencies of other countries wouldn't have routine access? When would it be destroyed, and how would we know for sure it had ever been destroyed? Of course it can be argued that in the age of the internet, a higher degree of surveillance will be necessary to prevent sophisticated crime.

But there are parts of the world right now where the internet is used as a form of political dissent against authoritarian regimes, and these sort of measures are precisely what are being used to hunt people down. And these are people whose only crimes are to protest.

This Government never asked for, and was never given, a mandate for this sort of gross and gratuitous intrusion into the privacy of citizens of a republic. This Minister for Justice, whose instincts seem more and more dictatorial, doesn't seem to need a mandate.

While I'm on the subject of rank hypocrisy, three cheers for the Transport Minister Seamus Brennan. Accused but not named by the Sunday Independent, he cleared his name by relying on the ability and good sense of public servants.

He shouldn't have conducted his own investigation it would have been more proper for him to have asked the Taoiseach's Department to do that and it would have been absurd beyond belief for him to have allowed the matter to go on for the fortnight he at first indicated.

But he was the victim of a deliberate shafting effort by an individual, and the Sunday Independent (the real hypocrite of the piece) was a willing accomplice in the attempted shafting. So it's good to see him back on firm ground, where we can have a go at him about political issues rather than unfounded personal attacks.

But is it now beyond belief that Aer Rianta, on foot of a political instruction, supplied the goods to someone and ultimately had to write off a bill? We may never know, but I for one believe it is entirely possible that semi-state companies, back in the late 1980s, were indeed used as personal playthings.

By this time next week, however, we'll have forgotten most of that.

Instead we will all be wondering what we ever did to deserve Charlie McCreevy.

There has been endless speculation about what will be in tomorrow's Budget. I reckon we should all be a lot more concerned about what won't be in it.

He is going to deploy a lot of spin. Do you know what new language they've come up with to describe the cutbacks? They've invented the phrase "consolidating our success". Believe it or not, Charlie is going to describe this Budget as one of consolidation.

I once wrote a piece in the Irish Examiner in which I sort of compared Charlie to Joseph (he of the amazing technicolour dreamcoat). Except that Joseph had seven years of plenty followed by hardship. When Charlie came into office, we'd already had the lean years. Joseph filled the warehouses so he would be able to provide when times were tough. Charlie just blew it, so now, the warehouses are empty and the doors are blowing in the wind. He's not going to own up in his Budget speech, not going to tell us he got it wrong by cutting taxes too fast and developing too many tax breaks and loopholes for the better off. Instead he's going to insult us by telling us that we need to consolidate our success.

So there will be no apology in the

Budget. And let me repeat you'll be able to judge this Budget by what's not in it. Especially under the heading of public spending there will be little or none of that.

The people who need public spending whose lives and well-being depend on state investment in health, education and disability services are going to be told by the Finance Minister of one of the richest countries in the world that they will have to wait. Taxpayers are, as usual, more important than people who are old, sick, infirm, or disabled. Instead of new beds, new treatment places, new childcare or respite facilities, new residential or training places for people with a learning disability, all they will hear, as Charlie consolidates our success, is the sneering sound of silence.