The Big Cheeses always ask Little Cheeses to take the deepest cuts

FLEETS of limousines rolling into Farmleigh to discuss other people’s hardship. Gated communities for failed developers. Huge pension funds for disgraced bankers. New phrases we all have to learn because we think they’ll tell us something about our fate – phrases like bond markets or bond spreads. And hard cheese for poor people.

The icons of our austerity are piling up. And they’re nearly all about people who are comfortable, far too comfortable, telling people who have little or nothing why they have to suffer more. The suffering that will be inflicted in next month’s budget will be deep and wide-ranging. It will involve cuts to allowances for hard-pressed families and cuts in essential services for many of the same people.

And yet it’s not being debated in those terms at all. I listened to as much media as possible the other day, when the Minister for Finance announced that the target for this year’s budget would be €6 billion in cuts and taxes.