Election manifesto season looms - Get ready for crescendos of aspiration

It must add to the gaiety of the nation that a prospective president has advocated Bunratty-esque famine villages with pop-up bacon and cabbage stalls, and flame-haired, coleen harpists to serenade tourists as they wrestle with glutenous, imported streaky bacon.

However, that gaiety must be tempered as that candidate has also advocated the death penalty. These excitements are, for the moment at least, confined to the minor game, the curtain-raiser election, but it cannot be too long more before senior captains have to offer their manifestos.

Election manifestos are crescendos of aspiration; the sweet nothings a lust-driven Romeo might whisper in an innocent ear but on a grand scale. They are a sales pitch made to secure that most envied commodity: power. Even if they are not deliberate works of smoke and daggers no-one regards them as anything more than an opening bid; an indication rather than a contract. That only one manifesto — the winning party’s — is tested adds to the constructive ambiguity around election huckstering. Nevertheless, a brief review of Enda Kenny’s last manifesto, the one that led to Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s administration, seems worthwhile, even if it cannot be balanced with a review of the alternatives though Fianna Fáil has more leverage today than nearly any earlier opposition.

The promise of an extra 200,000 jobs by 2020 may be reached even before that date. Unemployment fell to 5.1% in June, the lowest level since October 2007. Expectations that 70,000 emigrants would return are on track too. Those are commendable achievements but there were other promises in Mr Kenny’s manifesto that can hardly be ignored. It promised to “double housing output to 25,000 per year by 2020”. That has not happened and will not happen without a revolutionary change in Fine Gael.

That this growing crisis was only the 16th item in the Kenny manifesto is revealing. That this failure persists in a rich country where almost 10,000 people are homeless is a scandal. That it happens in a country where a Dublin home, once sold for a record €58m, is to be knocked and replaced with a 17,168sq ft mansion by a trust that bought it for €14.25m in 2016, underlines the chasm between rich and not so poor in this society. The Kenny manifesto did little or nothing to slow that polarisation.

The promises made on broadband are, predictably, embarrassing. Fine Gael pledged: “We will ensure that 85% of premises... have access to high-speed broadband by 2018, with 100% access by 2020.” If broadband promises are just embarrassing then promises made on farm production are a dangerous driver of emissions growth. There were also promises to “end boil water notices and the scandal of raw sewage being pumped into our rivers and seas will be ended”. Indeed.

It is almost unfair to hold a manifesto to account but no more so than the knowing inclusion of unattainable targets is. Maybe we should take an hour or two before the ball is thrown in the senior game to read even all the parties’ headline promises in their last manifestoes. After all, it is harder to lead an informed voter up the garden path than most manifesto authors might wish. Or at least it should be.