Government is again washing its hands of fiscal responsibility

AUSTERITY is now an orphan. Fianna Fáil and the Green Party begat it when in government. Fine Gael and Labour said the foundling child had to be fostered if we were to regain our self-respect and self-sufficiency.

Now, hardly out of short trousers, blamed for everything wrong in the house, the child is back on the side of the road; bedraggled and bad-mouthed.

The Greens, for now, have vanished. Fianna Fáil, whose DNA is implicated in the original deed, and Labour, who, to the horror of its natural family, became godmother, have recanted, and deserted their responsibilities. Each, in turn, had staked their credibility as patriots, as distinct from their self-interest as politicians, on their commitment to austerity. All repeated the same mantra: any hit in the opinion polls was worth it, if we returned to a sturdy, strong, self-respecting state of affairs.

Is there any meaningful bond left, even in Fine Gael, with economic and fiscal restraint? It’s hard to know. Clearly, there are some within that party who would claim to subsist solely on cold showers and frugality. This morning, as the Cabinet meets, all the attention is on who will gain from the ‘reliefs’ from proposed water charges.

I knew on Monday morning that the country was going backwards rapidly, when I heard an emotive member of the public speak on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland about their “God-given right” to water. That nonsense passed un-interrogated into the gathering manure heap of commentary that is eerily reminiscent of the early noughties.

Then, the cant was all about private affluence and public squalor. That — if I can provide the interpretation — meant we want your money to pay for our services; and we have a moral basis wrapped in a slogan to justify it. The services required were always for ‘us’ and the money to pay for them was always from ‘you’. The moral foundations were rapidly washed away by events.

Never mind that the media and the opposition were cheerleaders for opening wide the sluice gates on public spending. There was never, ever enough money spent to satisfy them. Their mantra was always more.

The fact is, however, there is only one government at a time, and government is ultimately responsible. Its job is to take the heat and withstand the pressure. That government back in the noughties didn’t take the heat. It didn’t withstand the pressure. It turned on the taps and didn’t bother putting the plug in the bottom of the bath. It was all scented suds and rubber ducks for a while, but you know how it ended. It ended badly.

The problem now is that the warning signs of the pitfall we fell into then are reemerging now. Chastened, but fundamentally unchanged, bereft of either democratic revolution or moral reformation, we are in the tightening grip, again, of an old political reflex: sectional interest is trumping the national interest. Short-term considerations are gaining credence over longer-term objectives, and electoral survival or success is superseding all.

The “God-given right” to water being arbitrated at Cabinet today is about who (and on what basis) can be ‘relieved’ of water charges.

In principle, that’s fine by me. Some genuinely cannot pay. If that means I have to pay more, so that all can have water, I am happy to do so. But let’s dispense with the codswallop about God-given rights.

Nobody paying into a group water scheme has any such right. Do we all have a God-given right to have our rubbish collected, if we don’t pay? I don’t think so.

Water is a commodity that has to be collected, piped and paid for, before it can be used by anyone. As set out in detail, in this column last week, the costs of delivering our God-given right to water currently cost €1.2bn annually, for a system that leaks 40% of its content back into the ground. Massive investment is required, if we are even to enjoy the proverbial wipe of a wet cloth under the national armpit, let alone a hot bath. God-given rights, indeed.

There is a lot of furore about opinion polls. That, by the way, is why media organisations commission them. It’s largely about marketing products, say newspapers, to increase shareholder return. They fulfil the same function that spot-the-ball competitions once did. They might tell you very roughly where something is, after which it’s up to you to guess, but mainly it’s about marketing. Its ultimate function is to lend itself to an electoral debate about who we like or loathe, and not what we need to do. The overarching political debate, ping-ponged from one opinion poll to the next, is itself the repetition of past failure, and not an interrogation of it, let alone a learning from it.

The story of Ireland, crystallising in these local and European elections, is a of a country which, since the collapse of 2008, has won battle after battle and is galloping on to lose the war. It is not that we have the excuse of being lions led by donkeys. It is that we are donkeys. If the media, the interest groups, the politicians, and, above all, the then government, deserve opprobrium for what went before, one group largely escaped castigation. The Irish people, with forethought and salivating greed, played a central role in fuelling the boom that ended in bust. Maybe there is a case for a general pardon on the basis that the ultimate consequences could not be foreseen. Perhaps.

But now? The second time around? So soon, again, that the debris of the first wanton wreckage is still strewn around our society. And yet, with gathering force, all around us, on doorsteps, in communities, amplified in the echo-chamber of mass media and charging on us — their willing donkeys — is a politics still half-running, but already half-mounted, of the unrealisable and unsustainable.

Even as the National Competitiveness Council warned that the hard-won, but only partial, recovery of our competitiveness was already eroding, trade unions are out demanding pay increases, which will undermine, not enhance, prospects for the unemployed. We need crusaders in politics, but we have careerists. The results of these elections are that those with the longer careers are now in opposition, promising everything but responsible for nothing. We only have one government at a time. They are ultimately responsible. The responsibility they are abdicating is the one they took up on entering office. Now, undisciplined by the departed Troika, they have lost their symbolic footing. There is a convincing case, in principle, for water charges, but they won’t make it. It’s back to business as usual, and it seems there is a mass-market for it. That mass-market is us, the Irish people.