Let’s learn from past mistakes: Promising tax cuts is at best unwise

It is a Monday-morning statement of the obvious that we live in a complex world, where many diverse issues stand between us and our imagined, if-only-we-could Nirvana.

Over the next month Eighth Amendment campaigning, in all its spleen and hyperbole, will suck all the oxygen from public discourse. The result, whatever is decided, will be a negative influence in the next Dáil. Responding will snare politicians, the brave as well as the cowardly, in our particular Gordian knot. Real progress may prove elusive.

Should there be even a momentary ceasefire in that endless culture war, the known unknowns of Brexit offer ample opportunities to imagine a glum future. This dismay is deepened by the reality that we have, unlike the fate of the Eighth Amendment, limited control over what may transpire. This issue has the capacity to undo much of the great progress we made since we joined the EU nearly half a century ago. It is, unfortunately, that pressing.

Should those irascible issues not provoke even a mild, start-of-the-week bout of melancholy consider how, decades after the climate change alarm bells began to ring, we have not mended our ways in a response that seems even moderately proportionate to the threat we all face.

Then, if you’re still chirpy, US president Donald Trump’s trade war which may have an impact on, amongst others, Aughinish Alumina’s 450 employees at the plant in Askeaton and another 400 working on contracts. Growing demands on tax harmonisation — a polite code for closing tax havens — must have an impact in a country where last year 2% of GDP growth came from the invoiced sales of a product — iPhones — that’s not made on this island. This one detail points to how very tenuous our €8 billion corporation tax base is, especially as it accounts for 16% of State revenue. So many eggs in one basket. There is almost a kind of inevitability too that the HSE, through the cervical smear scandal, makes its regular contribution to this litany of woe but there is a looming issue, over which we have complete control, that has the capacity to have a huge impact on our future.

Pre-season training for the next election is well underway if not completed. In that context, Finister for Finance Paschal Donohoe’s assertion that he wants to avoid the mistakes of the past is as cheering as delivering on hard-learned lessons is unprecedented. Political expediency that promised to tax cuts matched with increased expenditure has left a terrible legacy but we are as likely as not to be seduced by the three-card trickery again.

Bertie Ahern’s flagrance — the benchmarking swizz, a €16-a-week hike in pensions, significant tax cuts and the ultimate sweetener of SSAI payouts falling due around election time — almost won him an unlikely Dáil majority. We were seduced and we are still paying for it. Despite that, it is hard to imagine that it’ll be different this time and that we’ll be the sophisticated electorate patronising politicians tell us we are. Some of us want “restoration”, but we also demand an answer to, among other things, housing and health crises. Surely its time to acept that we can’t have it both ways?