Voters may soon realise their errors

One elderly lady to whom I spoke in the run-up to the Fiscal Treaty Referendum rounded on me angrily when I suggested a ‘No’ vote, asking: “Don’t you want your pension?”

On reflection, she probably realised that would not be an issue for me for some years to come. But she stormed off before I could ask her to reflect on whether handing over final say on our budget to Brussels was the best way to guarantee her own pension.

In order to meet the targets under the fiscal compact, some even harsher budgets will have to be engineered and my suspicion was that further low-hanging fruit like medical cards for the over 70s, free TV licence, gas and more, would all be targeted as ‘extravagant relics of the welfare state model of yesteryear’.