An opportunity rather than a conclusion

There is an oft-quoted anecdote about a meeting in the early summer of 1829 between the Liberator Daniel O’Connell and a Kerry road worker shortly after the Roman Catholic Relief Act — Catholic Emancipation — had been passed by the House of Commons.

O’Connell was on his way to his home at Derrynane when the stone-breaker asked him how the act and the new freedoms it conferred might change his life: “’Tis all the same to you Scully, you’ll still be breaking stones,” replied O’Connell. As we exit the bailout we may not be exactly at that point but, metaphorically at least, we still have a lot of stones to break.

Even to reach this point is a considerable achievement, one that required, and still requires, a level of discipline in the management of public finances that is not always attractive or even natural. This unfortunately means that some privileges and services we imagined permanent are just memories. We cannot forget — ever — though that some of those privileges were financed by unsustainable borrowings and that the generation that enjoyed them has passed, at least partially, the bill to a subsequent generation.