Coalition must tread carefully to budget day
HANGING together, as distinct from hanging separately, requires skill. Choreography on the gallows takes as much poise and more gumption than it does on the catwalk. Hanging together, however, is not something this Government is good at. Not that there is any chance of a break-up. Talk of an early election was just loose talk caused by, well, loose talk.
Brian Hayes, the junior finance minister, had some serious points to make last weekend on the entitlements of older people. His point is that age-based benefits given regardless of income ultimately cost others far less able to bear the brunt of cuts. The aftermath of the stampede of the Grey Hussars down Kildare St against the removal of the over-70s medical card is a state of permanent political terror of a repetition. Were a government to be so bold and so brave as to take on the grey brigade it would need to plan its course carefully.
Brian Hayes may conceivably have been a stalking horse on this issue for Michael Noonan, the finance minister, but I doubt it. In any event, his intervention has delayed the sort of methodical debate needed to slowly circle a beast with a ferocious appetite for political flesh. Approaching the topic in a less supine position than bended knee invites emotionally charged accusations of spreading fear among the elderly; even as it seems that the elder lobby is winning the psychological war effortlessly.
The musing of one minister was, as is now customary, met by a swift rebuke from another. Joan Burton, the minister for pensions as well as the variety of entitlements enjoyed by older people regardless of income, had no intention of stepping into the tumbrel young Hayes had carelessly left parked on the double yellow lines outside her door. Those were his personal opinions, she retorted. Indeed.
Government, however, is const-itutionally a collective. It is not just that all the decisions eventually have to be made together. In the real world it is much better if they are ruminated on and processed together as well. For a government never done preaching austerity, they are proving astonishingly spend-thrift with their own political capital. Perhaps it is a case of easy come, easy go.
The largest Dáil majority in the history of the State was largely the gift of the most unpopular government in the history of the State. Not having Fianna Fáil beside your name on the ballot paper on Feb 25, 2011, exposed very unlikely candidates to a serious risk of election. Mick Wallace now knows just how menacing that risk was.
Managing government on a day-to-day basis is like minding mice at a crossroads. It takes constant, even hourly, plotting on the sat nav systems to ascertain where ministers are and what they are at. The notion of loqu-acious ministers wandering around studios with their own opinions as distinct to the ones carefully worked out between them is a horror movie.
Environment Minister Phil Hogan and Health Minister James Reilly have had to play starring roles in the series. Hayes escaped lightly. While he may have some influence as a minister of state, like Stanley Baldwin’s harlot throughout the ages, he bears no responsibility.
Reilly bears in political terms what is probably the ultimate responsibility. He has charge of, with Burton’s Department of Social Protection, one of the two biggest spending departments. He has responsibility for the most emotionally charged area of public policy. If reminder was needed, the arrival on Kildare St of very persuasive and ultimately very able, if physically challenged, users of the personal assistant service the HSE clumsily proposed to cut, is testament to that.
The sum of money at stake — €10m out of a proposed €130m in total HSE cuts — was paltry. It is worth remembering what that €130m is for. It is to make up an overrun in expenditure in 2012. Budget 2013 cuts are another matter and of a magnitude many times greater.
It is a measure of how serious the personal assistant service is for people with disability and how credible they are as campaigners that they have committed to working with the HSE to identify ways in which savings can be made without impairing badly needed services. Time will tell if this bears fruit. With a budget well in excess of €1bn and successive reports including last July’s Value for Money and Policy Review of Disability Services setting out again the lack of systems to allow adequate transparency and quality assurance for such a large budget, there must be room to do some things smarter and cheaper.
Yesterday the Dáil returned. The countdown to budget day in December began. Spending must be cut by at least another €2bn next year and more than a quarter of that will come from health; more still from welfare. Throw the property tax in and you have a politically poisonous mix.
Reilly goes into the fray unusually on the front foot having successfully done a deal with the hospital consultants. Fianna Fáil jumped the gun in putting down a motion of no-confidence in him. He will wave the consultants deal in their face and promote it as “peace in our time”.
But as the evenings are drawing in, the political pace is quickening. Only a quantum step-up in its capacity to co-ordinate its own ministers can save the Government from a series of budgetary debacles.
A final note. We may be forgiven for imagining that Kate Middleton’s boobs are the biggest foreign news story. In fact an American and British armada is massing in the Persian Gulf to prevent any Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its flow of shipping including oil in the event of hostility with Israel. The region is fraught with tension. The US elections are tempting some players to take unprecedented risks. Should hostilities begin, all budgetary projections should be shredded on impact.
* Gerard Howlin is a public affairs consultant, and was a government adviser from 1997 to 2007
