BUDGET 2016: A process that exploits our naivety

THE finance minister’s annual budget speech is one of the grand dramas in our parliamentary landscape. It is a media-fest of almost endless speculation; leaks if the news is good but secrecy if the news is bad. The process is not perfect but it is how we do things and how we generate a momentum that may not always deliver the best long-term results. It has as little to do with vision as it has to do with accountability.

It is, as often as not, a response to that affliction of our time — demand democracy, a categorisation that recognises the short-term, self-serving kind of decision making that we all indulge in — “give me that and I’ll vote for you, if you don’t give it to me I’ll vote for someone who says they will”. It is an auction where politicians bid for their careers and the idea of real, uplifting reform must wait for another day. Again.

It is rarely, and we cannot blame politicians for this, an exercise in principle or the championing of unpopular truths. Truths like the fact that most of us expected, if not demanded, tax cuts from Mr Noonan yesterday, despite the fact that we still borrow the bones of €10 billion a year to run this little country, where just over two million people work and where hundreds of sick people often wait on hospital trolleys. A country where we indulge bizarre, utterly nonsensical white elephants like spending the bones of €2m a year to sustain a daily air service for the Aran Islands. All in a country that will be rocked on its heels when historically low interest rates and oil prices begin, as they inevitably will, to climb again. All of those weaknesses, those candy-shop indulgences, are exacerbated when the last budget before an election is prepared.

Yesterday, Mr Noonan published what might be his last budget — but don’t bet on that. It was, no matter where your political allegiances lie, a considerable achievement that he was in a position to avoid increasing taxes except on tobacco and offer modest gains to working families and those earning up to €70,000 a year — the squeezed middle.

It is, after all, just four years since he and his colleagues took office and spent the first two if not three years of this Government’s term bailing out the lifeboats. We have, in our demands for payback and pay restoration, very quickly forgotten how precarious our situation was. Indeed, it is possible to argue that we have forgotten so very quickly that we may well repeat the mistakes that led to our downfall.

Nevertheless, changes to the loathed USC will be widely welcomed but, again inevitably, there will be some who will argue that Mr Noonan has not gone far enough. However, the news that 2,260 teaching posts will be created in the next year, including 600 additional resource teaching positions, must be at least acknowledged positively.

It is disheartening though that, as Gerard Howlin argues on this page, that the anticipated budget package of €1.5bn magically doubled to €3bn because public services ran so dramatically over budget. Those are the core issues that shape our future, not a modest cut to the USC. As long as we have an insatiable appetite for being bought with our own money we will, deservedly, be treated like the proverbial mushrooms.