BUDGET 2016: A spoonful of sugar helps medicine go down

No sugar tax, but Michael Noonan sure wants you to think of him as your sugar daddy when he takes you on that date to the polling station he’s been promising you.

The levy on fizzy drinks was slapped down because the Coalition needs to keep everything as sweet as possible in the hope that voters suddenly forget about the bitterness of the past four budgets.

There was even sugar for other daddies as Mr Noonan promised two weeks of paternity leave. But, as with so much else, this only kicks in well after the election, September to be precise, and only if you vote the right way.

So, in a bizarre sign of just how much Ireland has shed its Catholic guilt, Mr Noonan has handed out the most effective method of contraception in history, as only a fool would get pregnant this side of Christmas now.

It was ironic that the words ‘Irish Water’ never crossed Mr Noonan’s lips, as this budget so resembles that hated utility in that it was full of leaks, smattered with punter-friendly bribes like the conservation grant, and, despite all the cash poured into it, unlikely to make people feel any better about this Government at all.

Because the only way this was really a giveaway Budget is in that it gives away the fact this Coalition will do almost anything to limit its losses at the looming general election.

The bondholders never got burned, but all that talk of never risking the economy with reckless pre-election spending certainly went up in smoke.

Rather than the financial calculations dictating that people could be €1,000 a year better off, the political calculations dictated that that would be the outcome no matter what the maths was.

Listing the spending surge by Fianna Fáil before the 2007 election, Noonan’s sidekick Brendan Howlin suddenly went off-script, declaring: “Now that’s election bribery, deputy”, as even auction politics was reduced to an auction between politicians as to who could do it better.

Mr Howlin, like an angry child poking a wounded dog with a stick, then deliberately goaded the opposition when he said: “Who speaks of Syriza now?” in a smarting reference to the anti-austerity dream that was strangled to death by Angela Merkel on the streets of Athens.

No one speaks of battling Frankfurt’s way in Labour any more either, as the German money men got their way with little pushback from the people’s party, so to disparage those who did at least try to achieve something fairer smacks of political cynicism.

While the ministers spoke, the fingers of Fianna Fáil’s finance spokesman Michael McGrath danced across his calculator like the legs of a particularly frenetic hamster on a wheel, as he sought out fiscal holes to punch through in the Coalition’s sums.

But Mr McGrath was stymied by the fact that the worst, and truest, thing you could say about this budget was that it reeked of Fianna Fáil political opportunism as the money robbed from carers in an act of deliberate drive-by cruelty by the Noonan-Howlin austerity hitmen was handed back to them as some kind of present for which they should be thankful.

Everything possible was thrown at pensioners because they are a key electoral bloc who always turn out in big numbers on polling day.

Those made homeless by the surge of soaring rents got nothing. The election arithmetic in play was easy to read. No address, no vote, so why would any politician in this Coalition care about that lot?

Not that this was a grubby, electioneering effort, oh, of course not!

No more booms, no more busts, Mr Noonan said as he delivered Bertieomics, a batch of bribes, and a sinking feeling of deja vu.

Far from basking in the gratitude of a battered nation, Mr Noonan may well find that, after the own goals of austerity inflicted on a weary electorate by this Government, a sudden sugar rush will leave people feeling sick.