It’s a hard Irish habit to break, governments buying elections

We could see a general election where a large number of independents are elected

WE’VE had our Budget. Seventy two hours prior to that we had a protest march involving up to 100,000 people on the streets of the capital. At almost the same time we had Dáil by-elections where the establishment political parties were given a serious kicking by the voters.

The backdrop to these most recent political developments has been a disaster zone for Taoiseach Enda Kenny, one which entered bizarre territory this week with him being drawn in to a controversy over a not-paid-for diamond ring, and accusations of dirty tricks in leaking emails to the media concerning one of his own TDs.

How to stand back and make sense of it all? The truth is that you can’t at present. There are too many variables. As we saw from the weekend, the public mood is pretty sour against the Government, and on the corridors of Leinster House there are Labour and Fine Gael TDs genuinely shaken by the huge turnout in the anti-water charges protest. The main opposition parties are not feeling too smug either.

There can be no doubt but that Budget 2015 was influenced in some way by this massive (by Irish standards) march, coupled with the elections in Dublin South West of Anti Austerity Alliance TD Paul Murphy, and independent Michael Fitzmaurice in Roscommon/South Leitrim.

There was a message in both of those results, not only for the Government, but also Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein, both of whom had expected to win a by-election each.

We had the strange situation, after seven years of austerity, where it was felt the Budget would prove the necessary distraction and antidote from all of this voter nastiness.

It was a Budget put together on the basis of a government which is scared and looking nervously, but also self interestedly, ahead to the general election. It was also a budget that put a nail in the coffin of Irish Water in terms of it ever being accepted by the population with the €100 annual cash relief to households in receipt of household benefits package or the fuel allowance, in other words almost half of us liable for charges. Minister Noonan also announced a new tax credit, worth 20 per cent of a household’s annual water bill, to be capped at €100 a year.

Without a doubt the Government was influenced by last weekend’s events and went even further than they should — rather than the €2billion in tax increases and cuts that had been anticipated just a few months ago, we got a budget package that involves over €1 billion in projected spending and tax cuts. In anyone’s language that is a massive turnaround, and no amount of positive economic news in recent months could hope to justify it, given how much we still owe as a country.

As the head of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council Professor John McHale said on Morning Ireland, ahead of the Budget, there are major risks around economic growth and the huge debt we have outstanding. The Council had urged the government to make a final push and cut that by a further €2billion.

What was really sobering was to listen to Prof McHale on Morning Ireland speak about how we had seen a “frenzy of interest group demands in last few weeks, and political pressures”.

The hope had been, he said in a rather understated way, that “we would be inoculated from repeating mistakes of the past but it is really remarkable how quickly memories seem to have faded”. That afternoon Finance Minister Michael Noonan and Minister for Public Enterprise and Reform Brendan Howlin failed to make a liar out of Professor McHale.

Oh the irony then of listening to Fianna Fail finance spokesman Michael McGrath stand in the Dáil chamber after the two ministers had delivered their speeches. He said the Coalition Government had decided to fire the first shot in its general election campaign and, in doing so, has proved it has learned nothing from the crisis we have just gone through.

“This is a budget straight from the book of old-school politics, a budget that is more about short-term political gain than what is right for the economy and our people. It is also a budget that exposes very clearly this Government’s flawed priorities.”

The real clincher was to hear him say that they in Fianna Fáil were taking a “different approach”. “For the first time in decades, because the Government did not do so in opposition, there is an opposition party prepared to stand back and show the courage to advocate responsible rather than popular politics which the Government is promoting.”

I wrote last week that the Budget was the opportunity for the Government to take back some control and attempt to get people to move on from the negative publicity of the last few months involving cronyism and general stupidity.

But that was written before the protest march last Saturday, and the by-election results. Now it is very difficult to work out where things stand. On the one hand you can accuse the Government of a fiscally irresponsible budget but on the other you have to wonder politically if people are so fed up with austerity that the goodies offered are not near enough to soften the mood of the voters.

We have lost any sense of collectivity, of being in this together, of working to correct past mistakes and making up for wrongdoing. The Government’s political failings have coincided with a population which has reached the end of its elastic limit when it comes to further economic pain.

I return to Michael McGrath in his reponse speech to the Budget. “There are bigger questions to answer. What are we about as a people? For what do we really stand? What are our priorities?”

He is correct. We could do with having that discussion and coming up with some answers. But looking around the Dáil Chamber on Tuesday there was no one on the Government or opposition benches, who appears to be capable of fulfilling that role and connecting with people in a genuine way to unite us in some sort of common purpose.

Drifting to the independent benches my eyes alighted on the newly elected Roscommon/South Leitrim TD Michael Fitzmaurice. He’s had a lot of airtime since his election on Saturday. An intelligent man, passionate about how politics affects people, he speaks a lot of sense, and his sense of concern about those who elected him, and wanting to make their lives better, is palpable. It’s easy to see how he got elected.

It’s heartwarming to see someone like that being successful in Irish politics. Yet the way things are going we could see a general election where a large number of independent are elected. The truth is that it doesn’t matter how many of them are the calibre of Michael Fitzmaurice it would make for chaos in our political system. How to persuade people of that though when the alternatives on offer have been making such an awful mess of things. No wonder the Government feel they have to fall back on that old Irish habit of buying elections.