Budget 2017: A light-milk budget of little nourishment and no cream

Instead of the giveaway or takeaway budgets, we have now been reduced to the old Roman governing formula of bread and circuses. A few crusts are thrown here and there to the citizenry, all wrapped up in a spectacle that could pass for a three-ring circus, writes Michael Clifford

DURING the Celtic Tiger, budgets were all milk and honey. In recent years, they were bread and water. Yesterday’s was our first watery milk budget.

It was neither here nor there, offering little in the way of vision or preparation for a future that is growing more uncertain as a result of Brexit. Something for some of those who need childcare, a few bob for pensioners, a wodge for rural Ireland, spread like manure to soften the cough of the hardy bucks in the Independent Alliance.

Fine Gael, the dominant party of government, even got to issue a nod towards its flavour of the year — abolishing the USC. Well, a nod might be extending it. One half of a percent was cut from the main three rates of what some party bigwigs have called the “hated” tax. For the average earner, that amounts to around €50 a year, which is hardly enough to banish the hatred from some Blueshirt hearts.

Those who labour under the minimum wage will have been partying long and hard into last night to celebrate a whopping increase of ten cent an hour.

Then, there was the silly stuff. One measure introduced was a help-to-buy scheme for first-time house buyers, with an upper limit on the property of €600,000. What first-time buyer in need of assistance is ever going to buy a house for six hundred grand?

That was the kind of tone that endured. There was no giveaway, but neither was there a takeaway.

Worse of all, though, there was no theme to the budget, nothing to suggest that the Government is intent on a long-term plan to genuinely reshape the national finances and minimise the prospect of back-to-a-future of boom-and-bust. There was no vision.

All parties made noises about Brexit, but the great unknown, represented by the UK’s exit from the EU, did not receive the requisite attention. For instance, a case could be made that there should have been no budgetary giveaway this year, in order to batten down the hatches for what might unfold.

Instead, it would appear that Brexit has been placed on the long-finger, out there where all problems can be delayed until after the next election.

Finance Minister Michael Noonan kicked off at 1.04pm, letting all and sundry know that this was his sixth budget. He outlined how different was the landscape when he delivered his first, as the country played footsie with bankruptcy. He has overseen a recovery, but the long view may not commend him to the extent to which he believes he’s entitled.

“We must get away from boom-and-bust cycles that have caused so much grief in the past,” he said. One solution was to set a new target for debt/GDP ratios, which, conveniently, he suggested might be reached by the mid-2020s, on somebody else’s watch.

His colleague, Pascal Donohue, may well still be occupying the same benches at that time, but, yesterday, he wasn’t offering any clear vision, either.

In reference to Brexit, he spooned out the line: “Maybe we will see opportunity where others see risk.” Let’s just stick a finger in the wind and hope for the best.

Once the two lads finished, the floor opened up to Michael McGrath, from Fianna Fáil, a party that both opposed and supported the budget.

McGrath noted that, for Fianna Fail, the term “a fairer Ireland” was not just a catchphrase, unlike those on the Government benches from whom he wanted to differentiate himself.

He praised the elements of the budget that he inferred had been inserted on his party’s insistence, and he took a few gentle digs at those elements he disagreed with, but would ultimately vote for anyway.

McGrath also admonished the sneaky Government for inserting an extra €300m into the giveaway, which, presumably, allowed the Government to hoard credit for that themselves. In the round, McGrath made a good fist of the high-wire act. This was always going to be the most awkward day for Fianna Fail’s confidence-and-supply agreement, but McGrath’s straight-faced delivery managed to cut down the quotient of embarrassment, albeit from a very high level.

Dara Calleary welcomed extra money for the mental health blueprint, Vision for Change, which he said was in contrast to the “smash and grab” of the previous year, when money ringfenced for mental health was diverted. You never would have thought that Fianna Fáil had been in government for the first five years of Vision for Change, when precious little was done to advance the blueprint and money was diverted to beat the band.

But this is new politics, where old rivalries have to be reassessed, and the business of politicking gets more intricate.

The first real opposition to this old-style budget box-ticking came from Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty.

“We are told this is an era of new politics, that things are different now,” he said.

“Then, why is the Government repeating the same mistakes in this budget as Fianna Fáil governments did in the past?

“Why are they shrinking the tax base, introducing property tax incentives that will only push up house prices?”

His words were accurate and may well turn out to be prescient, but lacked any force, because there is precious little to suggest that if, and when, he is on the government benches he will be doing anything really different.

So it went, with this watery milk budget.

Instead of the giveaway or takeaway budgets, we have now been reduced to the old Roman governing formula of bread and circuses. A few crusts are thrown here and there to the citizenry, all wrapped up in a spectacle that could pass for a three-ring circus.