Any post-budget protest must not tarnish the cause we aim to serve

IT is being widely rumoured that the Government is preparing for civil disturbances in the aftermath of the budget.

Gardaí, it is said, are in weekly training and contingency plans are being prepared in the event that people throughout Ireland decide to follow the people of France.

That’s how bad things are. Would it surprise any of us if some of the more extreme measures that are being speculated about at the moment really were to be the straw that broke the camel’s back?

Most of us, I think, have felt let down and betrayed by the collapse of our economy in the past two years, by the things that caused it and by the policy responses to it. There hasn’t been a moment in the past two years when Ireland has got the leadership it deserved and needed.

And yet people have swallowed hard, again and again, for the sake of the economy and the people around them. The people I work with directly have taken two voluntary pay cuts in order to keep the show on the road, to protect the families they work with from the effects of cutbacks.

Throughout the country, thousands upon thousands of people have made similar sacrifices.

Now, it has to be said that no one marched last year when Brian Lenihan’s budget speech contained a pretty strong assault on a number of different groups. That speech was quite remarkable in a number of different ways. He started off, for example, by telling the Dáil, and the rest of us, that “we are now on the road to economic recovery”.

In the third paragraph of his speech he said: “I want to tell the Irish people that even though our economy is still in a weakened condition, and our self-confidence as a nation has been shaken, the Government’s strategy over the past 18 months is working and we can now see the first signs of a recovery here at home and in our main international markets.

“We have taken bold, decisive and innovative steps to manage our way through this crisis. In all our actions, our concern has been to protect jobs, to provide a functioning banking system and to return this economy to the path of sustainable growth. We have sought to do all of this in a manner that is fair and that protects the most vulnerable.”

And then he went on to announce a 5% cut in the pay of the lowest-paid public servants in the country (those earning €30,000 a year of less), with bigger cuts for those on higher wages – that was on top of the 7% pension levy already applied. He cut €16 from child benefit rates and €8 from a range of allowances paid to carers, people with an intellectual disability, and others. A double week’s payment at Christmas for people in these categories had already been removed.

But in last year’s budget the minister left the middle classes alone (apart, that is, from middle and higher income public servants). As one caller to Joe Duffy put it after the budget, the only impact on him (and he was a man prepared to contribute more) was an increase in the cost of a bottle of wine.

The minister ended his speech last year with some references to John F Kennedy, and then, finally, with these ringing sentences: “As we begin to emerge from the unrelenting economic gloom of the past 18 months, we need to rediscover our optimism and our self-belief. Now more than ever, we need that confidence on which business thrives. The measures contained in this budget, some of them unpalatable, will engender that confidence … we have taken the hard decisions, but we have been fair … Our plan is working. We have turned the corner.”

Ten months after that speech, does it feel like the plan is working? That we have turned the corner? Above all, that we have been fair? In fact, we now know the opposite. When the crisis began, we started by attacking the weakest. We put a plan in place that was doomed to fail. That plan has consisted mainly of pouring money into the bottomless pit that is the banking sector.

In pursuit of that plan we turned our backs not just on individuals and groups of individuals, but on entire communities. So we know that the approach was anything but fair.

And as for turning the corner, it’s been like trying to work our way through a jungle full of danger. Every time we turn a corner, we’re confronted with yet another snarling animal, ready to attack us again.

The likelihood is that many of those who have made deep sacrifices over the past couple of years – in the community and voluntary sectors, for example – will be hit again on budget day.

In short – and there is no avoiding this – the record of the past couple of years has been one of total and abject failure. A failure of leadership, a failure of imagination, a failure of communication, a failure of creativity.

And it perhaps reached its bottom in the past couple of weeks when the parties who are supposed to govern us decided to play politics by trying to suck the opposition parties into a position of taking responsibility for a better outcome – without, of course, being given the power to try to secure it.

So why should we expect anything different on budget day? In his song The Island, Paul Brady talks about how our “fight for freedom” is built on the notion that we can “reach the future through the past” – as he puts it, like trying to carve tomorrow on a tombstone.

AND in this year’s budget, it seems, the Government is going to tell us they’re growing the economy by shrinking it. They will protect the vulnerable by making it harder for them to make ends meet. They will introduce fairness by providing for more children to live in consistent poverty. And all because they made no provision in the good years – as Charlie McCreevy once said, when they had it, they spent it.

Well, Fintan O’Toole said last week that we’re stuck with austerity now, but we don’t have to be stuck with the people and the systems that gave it to us. This is going to be a hard budget – it has to be.

We’re all going to have to take pain – there’s no avoiding that.

But when this budget is done, we may well have to protest – and if we do, for God’s sake let’s make it peaceful and democratic because anything else just tarnishes the cause we’re protesting for.

Let’s protest, if we have to, for the things they give lip service to, but never deliver. For fairness. For decency. For a leadership that trusts and respects us.

Let’s acknowledge there has to be sacrifice, but let it be for a purpose, that it has to be shared, and it has to help to make things better.

We can’t allow the people and the systems that got us into this mess to drag us on an ever-downward spiral of despair. It’s time to make a fresh start.