Ministers pose, but who has spine to make wealthy pay?

MEMO to Roisín Shortall: What’s the point in having half a spine?

The Choke Park/Hope Park* Deal (*delete according to prejudice) gets a bad rap, but it is really the poverty of political ideas and lack of a Cabinet backbone that is suffocating this country.

Shortall’s incendiary intervention into the no-confidence vote debate on James Reilly is a case in point — she made it abundantly clear she has absolutely no confidence in Reilly, explained methodically why nobody else should have any confidence in Reilly, and then did as she was told to do and voted full confidence in Reilly.

Her feeble failure to follow through with her convictions and resign from her junior health post if she thinks the boss is really that bad meant Reilly, who lives so dangerously he should be known as Dr Dicing-With-Daily-Political-Death, was able to rubbish her well-argued critique of his performance by noting that “actions speak louder than words”.

The sight of health ministers kicking lumps out of each other in public at every opportunity would be alarming enough if the rest of the Cabinet was performing well — but, sadly, they are not; dysfunction seems to be the default position for this administration.

Brendan Howlin, the Minister for Smugness, sorry, Public Sector Reform, boasted back in April that when he lit his bonfire of the 1,100 allowances, “raised eyebrows” would greet the absurdity of many of the payments he was putting to the torch. But instead of eyebrows being raised, Howlin’s stature was severely diminished as 1,099 of the allowances remained unsinged, with his pathetic little sparkler burning up just one payday perk.

So, instead of saving the promised €150m next year, we will be lucky scrape back €3.4m. No wonder Clare County Council is behaving like some Orwellian authoritarian state and threatening to cut teenagers off from an educated future as they must pay for the “sins” of fathers and mothers who dare not to stump up for the offensively unfair household tax. What will the Obergruppenführer of Clare decree next? That all medical treatment be withheld from the families of people who have failed to pay their TV licences?

But back to little Brendan... on arrival in Government, Mr Howlin boasted that the Finance Department was being grandly divided into two equal parts between himself and Michael Noonan. It was going to be a bit like the 4th century carve-up of the Roman Empire, though with fewer togas — but unfortunately for Brendan’s plans for world domination, Mr Noonan took a slightly different view, which was: “Back off, buddy, I’ve got the title, so I’ve got the power.”

Howlin did get an equal share of one prominent department after all but, unfortunately for him, it was not the Department of Fiance, but the Department of Over-Promise Followed By Inevitable Incompetent Climb-down — which he straddles with walking health hazard Dr Reilly.

Indeed, the spectacular collapse of Howlin’s attack on the allowance system was so poorly handled, some suspect Brendan has been taking PR advice from Mitt “the Twit” Romney.

The so-called “in-depth report” it was based on was so sloppy and devoid of facts it might as well have been texted in by a lazy 13-year-old distracted by the Hollyoaks omnibus.

Still, it gave right-wing media commentators and radio hosts the chance to once again kick the whole Choke Park/Broke Park/Joke Park* (*choose emphasis according to knee-jerk level of outrage) set-up.

Clearly, Croke Park is far from perfect — but then it was the second-last gift to this nation from the Fianna Fiasco administration before it surrendered economic and financial sovereignty to foreigners. However, the deal has succeeded in its key aim of preserving industrial peace, which has seen us avoid the wave of strikes crippling fellow basket-case economies such as Spain.

It would be a pain if health workers went on strike and outpatient appointments had to be cancelled — but then, as people have to wait up to four years to be seen anyway, thanks to the system inherited from the Fianna Fiasco bubble, who would really notice?

Public sector workers have, on average, lost 14% of their earnings through cuts since the financial collapse and, while a small, but hugely annoying, section, still command large salaries, how do you ensure those paid €8.65 an hour to clean up other people’s vomit from hospital floors do not get unfairly hit again?

You cannot unpick Croke Park. It has to be all or nothing.

But making it the whipping boy for all this country’s ills is obtuse and merely plays into the political narrative of a particular ideology.

Because while we are constantly told to demonise Croke Park, there is no time left to discuss other financial choices that this country could pursue if a it had a Government with backbone.

WHY is the idea of a wealth tax continually dismissed as ridiculous as the right wing returns to attack Croke Park again and again? Surely both ideas deserve equal scrutiny as revenue-raising opportunities?

It does not seem so ridiculous in France, where the Socialists have won power in the presidency and National Assembly for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century on the back of imposing a 75% wealth tax on those earning above €1m.

And while those fearless socialists in the Labour Party are terrified of anyone even muttering about the possibility of frontline health cuts being avoided by imposing a third rate of income tax for earnings above €100,000, what is happening in Britain? Ah yes, a Tory-led coalition has kept Gordon Brown’s third rate of income tax and found that, when it did cut it from 50% to 45%, its popularity began to collapse as voters clearly viewed the upper rate as the only real manifestation of the Conservative Party’s empty election soundbite that “we are all in this together” .

It is easy to continually kick public sector workers on the minimum wage — but where’s the spine needed to make the many wealthy people pay their fair share?