€100k ad spend - Spin goes on Government extravagance

There are people in a developed country such as ours who would rate €100,000 as relatively small beer.

They’re accountants, lawyers, company executives and government ministers signing off projects and social programmes weighed in millions and billions, not mere thousands.

What’s the problem, then, when we learn that almost €100,000 has been spent by the Government on a variety of social media advertising and marketing campaigns since January?

The first problem is that people such as the 800,000 in poverty, the 700,000 on hospital waiting lists and the 10,000 without a roof over their heads might reasonably ask why the Government is spending as much as 1c of taxpayers’ money on advertising that might just have rather more to do with party politics and Fine Gael’s election prospects than improving the lives of citizens.

The second one is that the Taoiseach’s department, still addicted to spinning, appears to have learnt nothing from its Strategic Communications Unit fiasco, where it disguised party political propaganda as news.

What exactly has the Government got for its €100,000?