The April budget - We need to prepare for a challenge

HEAVY indeed is the head that wears the crown and there’s no sign that the load will get any lighter any time soon — for the head wearing the crown or the rest of us.

Just yesterday a series of skirmishes showed how our economic crisis is eating at the fabric of Irish life.

A Health Service Executive directive to all hospitals and community health facilities decreed they must not renew temporary workers’ contracts unless they have explicit approval. Impact, the largest health union, claims the edict will affect 14,000 workers — about one in eight HSE employees. This will have an impact on services and on the lives of the workers involved.

At the same time, at an “Extraordinary General Court” of Bank of Ireland, bank insider and newly appointed chief executive Richie Boucher was confronted by shareholders who expressed a deep anger that has moved well beyond impatience.

Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan earlier told the Dáil he anticipates the tax take for 2009 will be €34bn, €3bn below January estimates. This is a 16% decline on 2008 receipts. Dress it up any way you like this will mean more taxes and more cuts.

Continuing this dismal theme, a HSE promise that accommodation for cystic fibrosis (CF) patients would be provided in Dublin 2010 has been shelved. A relatively small group of people with great and pressing needs were — again — left isolated and worried.

Doing their bit to add to the gaiety of the nation employers’ group IBEC said it is hard to envisage pay increases for workers for at least two years.

And still there’s more. Plans for a drugs strategy are in tatters after the team overseeing a €34 million fund for addiction services or drug task forces has been made redundant. Drugs Minister John Curran has been warned addiction projects will be “adversely affected”.

Yes indeed, these are extraordinary times and our optimism and resilience are being tested in ways we never dreamt possible even this time last year when Bertie Ahern told us, with an assertiveness that can now only be seen as the most pathetic political pantomime, that everything was rosy in the garden.

Nevertheless these great problems, like Bertie Ahern, are rooted in the past and the solutions must lie in the future. The depressing situations described here are just a snapshot of the great pressures being exerted on our way of life. They are a fraction of the difficulties facing the men and women working to prepare the April 7 budget.

It is not a responsibility many of us could discharge or even welcome but it must nevertheless be confronted.

Many services regarded as vital will be curtailed or cut, many interests groups will feel hard done by. This budget will only work if it is informed by reality and equity. It will only work if we can be assured that each cut is unavoidable and that every option has been considered before it is made.

It is easy to be a politician on the ditch these days, easy to confuse wishful thinking with planning but those preparing for April 7 have no such luxury. They will have to cut much of what enriches our lives, maybe even some of the programmes that help sustain us. We can do little more than wish them well and hope they get it right for all our futures are, to an uncomfortable degree, in their hands. We expect an appropriate response from our politicians to this once-in-a-lifetime crisis so we cannot expect anything less of ourselves.