Michael Clifford: Budget spending splurge is both reassuring and unsettling
Budget 2021. Picture: Collins Photos Dublin
There were echoes of better times in the Convention Centre.
If you closed your eyes at various points during Paschal Donohoe’s budget speech you could have been back in the halcyon days of the Celtic Imposter.
Bertie-nomics, the scattering of money into every corner on the never-never, was all the rage again.
Paschal couldn’t give it away fast enough.
“From the ashes of the pandemic, together we will build a stronger and more resilient Ireland,” the minister said. And from those ashes, he plucked the guts of €18bn to get building.
In keeping with another strand of Bertie-nomics, Mr Donohoe declined to do the decent thing and raise some taxes from those who can afford them.
“Resources must be focused on saving jobs and protecting health,” he said.
But what about the K shaped recovery? Some are going to do quite alright out of the coming storm while others are in danger of being swept away.
Overall, though, the whole thrust of the budget was about spend, spend, spend our way out of what could be a deep recession.
It sure as hell beats the alternative as attempted in that downturn, which was austerity.
Difficult as it may be to believe, but ten years ago when we all thought things could never get worse, Brian Lenihan delivered a budget which included €6 billion in cuts.
Today, when things can’t get any worse – please – his successor is reaching for a pump to prime the economy rather than Lenihan’s scalpel.
That there is practical unanimity on the spending splurge is both reassuring and unsettling.
No more do we have economists – many of whom work for financial institutions – lecturing that austerity is a medicine that will have to be taken in big dollops.
All now acknowledge a different approach is required.
There is no dissent from that view, which infers that there is simply no alternative argument. But recent history has also shown us that group-think is a dangerous thing in economics, so let’s just hope that they get away with it this time.
As for Paschal, he couldn’t help but throw in the mandatory Heaney line in his concluding remarks.
“If we winter this out, we can summer anywhere,” he quoted.
And then he indulged himself in a few lyrical lines of his own.
“So, as the evenings shorten and the leaves change colour, we re-commit ourselves to the road ahead. I can’t say for certain how long the journey will take but I can say that we all have roles to play; collectively and as individuals, for the benefit of ourselves, each other and our country.”
On sitting back down, Mr Donohoe ceded to his chuckle brother, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Michael McGrath. While a certain tetchiness gnaws away at the relationship between their respective bosses, these two lads are getting on a like Paisley and McGuinness.
McGrath went through some of the goodies that will be handed out and from that point of view, it was a great budget for a spending minister to deliver, whatever about the horrible reality that awaits him outside the Convention Centre.
The great giveaway could have threatened to rain on Pearse Doherty’s first response as the main opposition spokesperson, but he was more than up to the task of picking holes.
Or at least making noises that sounded like picking holes.
It may have been nerves but he raced through his speech at a rate that suggested he had to be somewhere within a minute of sitting down.
However, his soaring rhetoric made a good fist of the kind of righteous indignation required of the opposition on a day like this.
At times, as his pitch rose to greater heights, he lapsed into the Gaeilge, as if he was auditioning for a role as the Dail’s answer to Micheál O Muircheartaigh. Pearse was not pleased with the amount of money that had been handed out.
He thought there was room for more.
“No increase in the weekly pension, not a single euro. Sinn Féin would have given €5 in the living alone allowance.”
He also wasn’t happy with the pledge to scrap the plan for moving the retirement age to 67 next year.
“You won’t even give pensioners certainty that they will have to retire at 66,” he said. “People need certainty…they should be able to retire at the age of 65. That is Sinn Féin’s position. We will accept nothing less.”
Raising the retirement age was, of course, a great vote winner for the Shinners at the last election when Mary Lou McDonald said the demographics of an aging population “would take care of themselves.”
As a strategy, this makes the never-never look like cash on delivery, but an opposition never refused to make a juicy promise.
In the round, Doherty gave a perfectly competent performance and looked like a man who is warming up one day soon occupying the main role on budget day.
For today though, in what we must hope will be the only Covid budget, it was all about keeping the focus on the long-distance, somewhere beyond this virus.
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