The Special Ones will show scant regard for the weak and voiceless

ANOTHER winter of discontent?

Are we likely to have street protests, angry deputations, powerful lobbies flexing their muscles? Will the Government be afraid? Probably not, actually. The early signs are that the targets for cuts this year will be people who aren’t very good at lobbying or protesting, people who don’t have much capacity to articulate outrage and anger.

The conditioning that is starting now would suggest it’s going to be primarily the weak and the voiceless who’ll be expected to take the next hit.

At this time of year, every year since time immemorial, the so-called estimates campaign gets under way. It usually starts with the minister for finance sending a letter to all his colleagues outlining the kind of submissions he expects to receive.

In that letter, he will set some kind of upper limit to total public spending and he will also outline what new policy initiatives he is prepared to consider.

Over the years of the Celtic Tiger, these letters were usually benign affairs. They effectively sent the signal to the system that things would be all right this year and that new spending demands – especially capital ones – could be discussed. It was one of the unusual, and usually unremarked, features of the Celtic Tiger years that we spent so much of the money coming in each year on bricks-and-mortar projects. The Department of Finance tended to find them acceptable – because you didn’t have to make a planned commitment to sustaining projects like that into the future.

There were a number of exceptions to the benign scenario over the years. Part of the pattern of the Celtic Tiger years was that the Department of Finance tended not to say no in the estimates campaign immediately prior to an election – but it always screwed down hard in the campaign immediately after an election.

The signal would always be in some phrase or sentence in the letter from the minister – usually something along the lines of “all proposals must be on a no policy change basis”.

This year will be radically different. Not only will the minister’s letter be parsed and analysed (in an atmosphere of fear) throughout the public service, but he will also be attaching the first report of the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes. This is the document the system has been dreading. And the rest of us should be scared, too.

This “special group” is more popularly known by the rather jolly title of An Bord Snip Nua. Jolly as it sounds, it’s a complete misnomer. A snip is a small, clean cut, usually done with a scissors. You snip a flower. But if you mow down the entire flower-bed, that wouldn’t qualify as a snip. And the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes – the Special Ones – are interested in mowing, not snipping.

The key words here are “expenditure programmes”. The Special Ones aren’t mandated to trim a little here and a little there – when they were set up, they were told their job was to “review the scope for reducing or discontinuing expenditure programmes with a view to eliminating the current budget deficit by 2011”.

That can only mean one thing – they weren’t sent out with a scissors, but with a hatchet. And boy, have they been busy. According to one Sunday newspaper this past weekend, the Special Ones’ report is ready and they have identified cuts amounting to as much as €4bn – which is exactly the target set by the Department of Finance for this year. And €2.5bn of that has to come from current spending.

One of the main targets of the Special Ones, assuming the media reports are correct, has been the Department of Social Welfare. Ministers are reported now to regard the taxation of child benefit as “inevitable” and there are rumours throughout the system that wholesale reductions are being contemplated for groups like lone parents.

Pensions are expected to be frozen at best, while we are also likely to see massive differentiation in the way unemployed people are treated, with young unemployed people seeing huge reductions in the support available for them.

Some of this will be justified, it appears, by reference to “poverty traps”. There are those in the system who argue that if you give an unemployed person a medical card, it “disincentivises” them from looking for a low-paid job. The other way of looking at that argument, of course, is that one way of forcing people to take up low-paid jobs is to starve them into it.

So we can, I think, expect huge cuts in this area – and the people on whom they will have the greatest impact will be those who have no one to speak out for them. If there was a social partnership process in place, one could perhaps expect the trade union side of that debate to take a special interest in people who have little or nothing as it is.

And remember, we’ve already taken Christmas away from a lot of the people involved through the abolition of the Christmas bonus. In the absence of any partnership process, will anyone take to the streets – or at least walk out of negotiations – because of an assault on the poor? If that wasn’t bad enough, look at the other bit of the Special Ones’ mandate.

The government statement setting them up said: “The review of numbers and expenditure programmes which will commence immediately is a special exercise to identify immediate opportunities for savings. The Government will build on this by developing a more focused system of value-for-money reviews which will target areas of significant spending in the areas of health, education, social welfare and justice and the results of these reviews will be published.”

WHAT kind of value for money do you get from ensuring young people with an intellectual disability are guaranteed a place in education at least until they are 18, and all the supports necessary to ensure that place really helps them to fulfil their potential? In a genuinely civilised country, the question wouldn’t even be asked. But I’m terribly afraid the value-for-money argument is going to dominate every decision about funding for services for vulnerable people from now on.

As things stand, there are families all over Ireland who don’t know if there will be a place for their child with an intellectual disability in September. Every single service provider in this area has been told that more “efficiencies” are expected of them – on top of the financial cuts already imposed earlier this year. Many of the service providers in the intellectual disability area have pared their services to the bone and cannot sustain further cuts.

But they’re being told that this isn’t about cuts – it’s about value-for-money, efficiencies, savings. Cuts are now core public policy. But no one is allowed to mention the word.

What all this means is that after all the years of growth and wealth accumulation, after all the ostentatious affluence, after all the hype, we’re going to discover this year that we can no longer support the most defenceless people and families in Ireland. Now that’s really special.