Cowen gives pragmatic performance during his budget gig for the elite
Commentators on one radio programme after another talked of his budget as “dull”.
It has certainly passed its entertainment sell-by date.
In our office, even when the owner of the mobile phone that kept squawking with minute-by-minute updates from Cowen’s speech announced to the two smokers that they were going to be paying 30 cent more per pack after midnight, the reaction was a distracted but not desperately heartfelt four letter word.
Neither of them rushed out to buy a month’s supply of fags at the lesser price before midnight.
Nobody, in the face of any of Cowen’s announcements, smacked the back of their hand to their forehead and cried “Woe is me!” Nobody even cried “Woe is someone else” because elements like the car emissions provisions were so confusing, if you didn’t have a vehicle nerd handy, you didn’t know whether your eight-year-old Ford Fiesta was doing better or worse than His Nibs’ new Lamborghini Murcielago.
You hoped, of course, that His Nibs would get an environmental lesson delivered right in the chops, but you knew that he probably wouldn’t even notice the extra cost.
The sixth time the mobile phone squawked, someone asked its owner to shut it up. “But it’s giving the budget speech as it’s delivered”, its owner said, turning it to “Vibrate”.
“Who cares?” was the response.
Good question, that. The answer is: vested interests and umbrella groups. Not the general public. Other than a friend who will close the sale on a house in two weeks and who stands to make €4,000 as a result of the stamp duty move, nobody among the ordinary people — us simple folks — gave much of a toss.
It was the first time I realised that the budget has gone from being national entertainment to being a gig for the elite. Once upon a time, the budget was exciting. The radio described the Minister and his Briefcase (the latter seemed so important, we automatically gave it capital letters) and cars lined up at petrol pumps to get fuel before the price went up. Because it was all about me, me, me. Me the smoker. Me the drinker. Me the car driver. Me the father. Me the earner.
Now it’s all about Them. We’re ‘IBECked’ up to the gills. Human talkers have been replaced by representatives of sectoral interests. How do you know someone is a representative of a sectoral interest? Because they talk enthusiastically about the National Development Plan. No real human has ever talked warmly about that. The great thing about Brian Cowen is that, although he can be entertaining, as when he does his rabble-rousing stuff at the Fianna Fáil árd fheis, most of the time he can’t be bothered.
He doesn’t send out messages to his advisers six months before the budget to the effect that he wants bright, shiny individual measures that won’t cost an arm and a leg, but that will give rise to loads of pictures, headlines and gain him credits for creativity.
He knows the budget is the most redundant exercise in public administration. Some 80% of it is already dictated by EU policy, long-running national plans and commitments to spend that nobody can suddenly abandon. The remaining 20% allows for placatory nods to the environment or other emerging priorities.
Brian Cowen doesn’t give a sugar for the problems he causes commentators. Or the difficulties he poses for accountancy firms. Both groups have to justify their presence on radio or their special informational events/publications by trying to sex up what he has announced.
This year, that was as easy as sexing up a dead whale. So they ended up spewing clichés (“steady as she goes”), doing promos for the Finance Bill (“that’s where the really significant shifts will be seen”) or, as one of them did, blaming Cowen for being boring, but suggesting that maybe boring was the right thing for a budget to be.
That commentator was right. The notion that the budget should be a source of vertiginous entertainment is crazily congruent with the current national conviction that boredom is a crime inflicted upon the individual.
Wrong. Boredom is a state of mind adopted by the intellectually lazy individual. Boredom is an abandonment of personal responsibility.
The child who announces “I’m bored” is the child who has been so over-supplied with stimulus, so chauffeured from one activity to another, so relentlessly entertained that it has a severe deficit in the inner resources department. If not given immediate remedial therapy, that child will grow into the kind of adult who hears and passes on the latest information about a sick model in hospital.
Frenetic competition between media outlets is at the back of it all. That competition puts a premium on the simplistic and the personal. It puts a premium on the famous at the expense of the complex, the conceptual and the significant. It also allows journalists to shift responsibility for elucidation to the sources of stories.
If a politician wants to be liked by media, he or she must deliver pre-chewed and already-illustrated material with an obvious headline, rather than requiring the hack to do any work to make the material interesting. That’s a simple reality, not a reproach. The only problem for the politician is walking the fine line between providing pre-digested, instantly sexy stories and angles, and turning into a trivialised photo-op addict.
TOM FENTON, the American media commentator, holds that the need to prevent boredom at all costs has led to media shrinking away from complex news in general and foreign news in particular, and to the substitution of “an endless flow of ‘news you can use’ — medical stories, consumer news — and the kind of frivolous and sensational fare that used to be limited to the tabloids”.
On the other hand, there can be no gainsaying the human hunger for the exceptional, the morally exciting and the visionary. That hunger is ever-present and, when met, is a source of great national pride. That’s why, although we bitch about Bono and Geldof, we’re still proud to hear them ticking off world leaders.
That’s why older readers of this paper have a positive recollection of Michael Killeen’s young men with briefcases heading off worldwide to drag multinational businesses into this country as part of the Lemass/Whitaker abandonment of the economics of isolation.
That’s why the most crassly commercial devotee of instant gratification still chokes up when they hear Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. And, of course, that’s why Cowen would have been more lauded if his budget speech was threaded through with a luminous vision.
Cowen himself, however, undoubtedly goes along with John Mueller of Ohio State University: “People with vast, sweeping visions caused most of the problems of the 20th century”, Mueller wrote. “Most of the time you don’t want leaders with visions, you want society run by cautious pragmatists.”
Cowen may deliberately choose to be boring, but he’s the living definition of a cautious pragmatist.
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