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.