Europe left wondering if the Government knows what it’s doing

IN many ways the Government’s indecision is understandable.

A glance any day at the reports and opinions of the economic experts shows a myriad of differing views.

The Government said it would have the four-year budget outline ready by early November. But now it transpires it won’t – and there is confusion about just when it will be ready.

This comes on top of all the varying figures of what bailing out the banks would cost and how much citizens would have to pay for it.

It’s little wonder that the EU has problems figuring out just what the Irish are at. During the week one Commission person wondered aloud if the Government’s idea was to leak everything gradually – first the €15 billion total cost and later the €6bn to be squeezed from the public next year.

The €6bn should have come with the budget plan showing how it could be achieved, but the figure appears to have been released as a stop gap to reassure the markets so they would stop pushing up the cost of borrowing.

If so, then it did not work because the difference between what is demanded to hold Irish debt and German debt is now about the same as it was for Greece when they had to appeal to the EU for a bailout.

Nobody expects Ireland to be reduced to the same state just yet, as we don’t need to go to the markets right now, but nobody seems sure what the Government is playing at. And the danger is that the Government doesn’t either.

Everything – including by-elections – appears to be happening by default. Ireland insisted it would get its budget back to a deficit of 3% of GDP by 2014. Normally, the time given to get a country’s budget back under control, even for the Greeks, is three years.

Getting four years seemed a reasonable length of time and at the time it cloaked the fact that the amounts to be shaved off the deficit each year were in fact more than under the previous three-year strategy.

But all has changed since then. We are not being accused of cooking the books as the Greeks were, but either because we like to fool ourselves or because we just did not have all the information, the figures have changed frequently and more dramatically than the Greeks.

And the famous four-year plan is still weeks away from being finished. In the meantime the European Commission and the European Central Bank are like terrified onlookers at a pantomime, warning that the wicked witch is behind us.

Half-hearted efforts to get the opposition parties on board and create a national government as far as the economy goes did not even get off the ground. The trade unions are still talking about the Croke Park agreement and nobody is even listening to any alternatives.

Little wonder that former taoiseach John Bruton told an IBEC conference last week: “We are at risk of having a crisis of helplessness in this country”. And you know things are desperate when he insisted that Ireland would pay its debts as not doing so would be a “betrayal of those who went out to die” in the struggle for independence.

Unfortunately, some see the current situation as a continuation of that struggle for independence and see Olli Rehn as the enemy.

People like Rehn assume we are all grown up, happy to take or reject advice and willing to take responsibility for our own decisions.

The only problem is that our leaders seem unwilling to lead and take decisions. At this stage almost any decision will do as long as it appears confident.