It’s not our fault, but we’re paying a heavy price for their economic mess

YOU’RE not responsible for the crisis — but you’re sure as hell going to pay for it, is probably the most succinct way to summarise the Taoiseach’s hotly anticipated state of the nation address.

In fact, in drafting his speech, Mr Kenny seems to have cut a few corners. Namely, studying the late Brian Lenihan’s previous budget speeches and then announcing the exact opposite — so, we haven’t turned a corner, there was no party, we’re not all to blame and the worst isn’t over.

It wasn’t so much a message of hope as, well, the exact opposite — a bald admission that the country is banjaxed and likely to remain so for the foreseeable. But, don’t worry, he said, we’re all in the mire together. Although the stink of manure is far more pronounced from some.

Disproving the truism that things can always get better, Mr Kenny warned us that without these latest budgetary cuts, the economic situation could get far worse and, in an effort to rally the troops, the Government is leading by example.

“Before asking families to make sacrifices, we also insisted on sacrifices from those at the top,” he said.

Strange then, that the Mail on Sunday this week revealed that Mr Kenny had personally intervened to secure his close friend, and former adviser, a €34,000 pay hike against the wishes of two of his cabinet ministers.

In a series of email exchanges, the case for Ciarán Conlon’s salary eclipsing Mr Kenny’s own guidelines was made, considered and ultimately politely rejected by the department of finance. Mr Conlon, touted as being so uniquely clever that he deserves his bumper salary, then acted decidedly stupidly by sending an intemperate email to the department complaining that the delay in authorising his pay increase was “ridiculous” because it had already “been passed at the very highest level in government buildings”.

Not to be outdone in the stupid stakes, Mr Kenny’s personal secretary then emailed the department and made clear, in no uncertain terms, that the Taoiseach wanted this man to get his money. Every single cent. Speaking on Morning Ireland on Monday, Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney wearily explained that some brains burn so bright that the Government has to spend big bucks to bask in their reflected glow.

He said that there are many people in the private sector “earning many multiples’ of the paltry amount, €127,000, being offered to Mr Conlon and that the government has to occasionally breach its own pay guidelines if it wants to get “the best people and the best advice”.

We’re doing this for you, you ingrates, was the subtext for listeners. You’ll likely remember this argument as it was the same one employed when we all scratched our heads and wondered why the dolts who ran the banks into the ground were still getting rock star salaries after the same bankrupt banks were bailed out to the tune of over €70bn. Like much government policy, Mr Coveney’s argument didn’t stand up to much scrutiny as it was immediately revealed that Mr Conlon, instead of working for the private sector, was actually employed by Fine Gael before taking up his position. Continuing his party’s proud record in boosting transparency and openness in government, the minister then petulantly refused to be drawn on Mr Conlon’s salary while he was a Fine Gael employee.

Meanwhile, not averse to spending taxpayers’ money with wild abandon himself, it was also revealed at the weekend that Mr Coveney spent €6,700 on publicity shots of himself at the National Ploughing Championships this year. Worst of all, the pictures, which show a beaming minister clowning around in mucky wellies and donning a chef’s hat to fry up some beef, don’t appear to be too flattering because his department is now refusing to release them to the press. Asked if it was, in retrospect, a tad unwise to take a personal team of paparazzi photographers to an agricultural show in the midst of the worst recession in the history of the state, a sheepish Mr Coveney conceded: “On the face of it, that looks expensive.”

I mean, who could possibly have guessed that spending €6,700 on pictures of the minister merrily prancing around in fields next to bulls and dung would blow up so spectacularly in his face? Certainly not the well-paid personal adviser who likely organised the entire fiasco on the minister’s behalf but I suppose we should all feel assured by his terse promise to “look into it”.

Back to Mr Kenny’s stirring speech on Sunday and he insisted “over the last months we have made a start, towards more jobs, towards more opportunities, towards renewed confidence” — a line reminiscent of cartoon egomaniac Buzz Lightyear and his catchphrase, “to infinity and beyond”.

Well, to be fair, Kenny’s own party members have certainly had more jobs and opportunities in the last number of months, as Mr Conlon will attest to, but out here in the real world, where most of us unfortunately reside, the unemployment rate is inexorably increasing, emigration is skyrocketing and new jobs are as scarce as fulfilled pre-election promises. In fact, economist Michael Taft has pointed out that this latest budget will actually cost up to 20,000 jobs and has labelled it a “jobs destruction budget”.

BACK in la la land, otherwise known as the Department of Finance, and the latest figures they’ve released claim that income tax receipts will surge by 10% next year — despite the fact that this year’s tax figures are down on forecasts and the ESRI’s latest scarifying report warns that employment will stagnate next year.

Where, exactly, is this magical money supposed to come from? Is Bertie going to give officials some tips in advance of the next big horse racing event? Regretfully for the Taoiseach, simply repeating the words “prosperity“, “jobs“, and “recovery” ad nauseam won’t actually make any of these things happen.

Meanwhile, in a sure sign the lunatics are running the asylum, Independent TD Stephen Donnelly has pointed out that the €1.25bn this impoverished country plans handing over to unguaranteed Anglo bondholders in January almost exactly equates to the total amount of spending cuts in this week’s budget — like the cut to elderly people’s fuel allowance and the slashing of disability benefit by 46% for young people.

The excellent namawinelake blog has also noted that the €720m that will be raised from the new €100 household charge, in the four years between 2012 and 2015, is slightly less than the amount that was blithely borrowed and dutifully handed over to more professional gamblers last month. When, one wonders, is someone going to shout stop? This is a question that was posed by a former chief economist with the IMF in an interview in the New York Times on Monday.

“The eurozone is entering a very serious slump, and it is not certain the euro will survive in its current form. Why Ireland would want to spend its time being a model student in the context of the broader European mishandling of the situation, I don’t know,” said MIT professor Simon Johnson.

Why indeed.