What Haughey wouldn’t have given for Cowen’s big spending options

HERE’S a decent sum of money to play with: €54,321,000,000. It looks enormous, in fact, when you write it down that way. Fifty-four billion sounds like a lot, but we seem to have got so used to talking in billions that the sound of the word has lost a lot of its impact.

The figures still look huge though, don’t they? Any government with that much cash would be able to solve any problem that confronted it. Wouldn’t it? And that’s precisely the amount of cash Brian Cowen announced last week he was going to spend on us in 2007. Of course, that was only the first step.

Next month he will be bringing in a famous budget — the biggest in our country’s history. And by the time he has finished announcing additional spending on current services and on capital projects, he will have brought the total to probably more than €56 billion.