Treading harshly on the poor, old, and vulnerable

MICHAEL Noonan boasted he was “handing Ireland her purse back” — but not before letting Brendan Howlin riffle through it to snatch what cash young mothers and old ladies had left in it.

The austerity double act of bad cop and even worse cop was keen to spin the budget as squeaky clean, but in reality it was a sneaky, mean effort that did not even spare the dead.

Quoting WB Yeats, Mr Noonan tried to present himself as the angel of austerity, fighting off demands to bring in harsher measures from the demons of Fine Gael by using the line: “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.”

But pensioners and bread line families left without even the meagre €850 bereavement grant to help give the deceased a dignified farewell from Jan 1 may have other opinions about the stoniness of Mr Noonan’s heart.

The finance minister had joked at the Fine Gael conference at the weekend that the country would be “astounded” by all the good news he would announce in the budget.

And no doubt the blind, disabled, carers, and the elderly who had the phone allowance that helps link them with the rest of the community ripped away from them must certainly have been astounded — but at the drive-by cruelty of the move which belied the minister’s jovial attitude of a few days ago.

Or, as Yeats may have said of Noonan: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”

WHILE refusing to help bury the dead, Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin had no such qualms about raising financial pain for the living as he and Mr Noonan dovetailed in their dance of Dáil despair.

Mr Howlin’s 27-minute speech was littered with more casual economic victims than a particularly blood-stained episode of Love/Hate as the young unemployed, women on maternity allowance, elderly people, and those receiving invalidity benefit were all singled out for an unhappy slapping that even Nidge might have found unnecessarily harsh.

One Labour TD branded the policy shift slight-of-hand that amounted to snatching medical cards from the elderly to give GP cards to the under fives — regardless of how rich their parents are — as “caviare socialism” aimed at shoring-up support in the “squeezed” middle class at the expense of the bottom reaches of society.

This may explain why Labour, the self-proclaimed “people’s party”, languishes at 6% in the polls.

Mr Howlin was careful to steer clear of any reference to caviare as he insisted it was all Fianna Fáil’s fault as they had left us “beholden like the famine victims of old”, but it was he and Mr Noonan who decided the well off in society should escape relatively unscathed, apart from a Dirt tax hike and a renewed, smaller levy on higher pensions.

It was, yet again, the vulnerable and the least able to fight back who bore the brunt of the seventh successive sledge hammer “adjustment”.

Those hit by the cuts cannot even “talk to Joe” about the misery they have been plunged into after Social Protection Minister Joan Burton scampered around pulling their phone plugs out of the wall.

Asked if they felt any sense of shame about withdrawing the bereavement benefit, Mr Noonan would not answer the question, while Mr Howlin, after not seeming to realise elderly people would be disproportionately affected, as, unfortunately, they tend to die more, said: “Any notion of shame is entirely inappropriate.”

Shame there’s no shame, but, of course, there was some joy for the ranks of the mass unemployed with the news the airport tax is to be abolished, thus making forced emigration cheaper.

As ever, Yeats had a phrase that befits a budget such as this: “But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

Noonan and Howlin have once again trampled on the poor, the vulnerable, and the old.