Irish Examiner view: Budget 2021 a chance to avert hateful culture war

Will Michael McGrath (right) make it possible for Irish people to take mortgages from continental lenders? File photo: Moya Nolan

Any parallels between today's budget and Charlie McCreevy's 2000 champagne vintage are coincidental or even illusionary. Tax cuts and social welfare increases were the order of the day then. 

McCreevy described that budget as the largest social welfare package in our history. A budget two decades earlier still - Michael O’Kennedy’s in 1980 - might be a better yardstick for today's Covid-19-dominated events. O'Kennedy faced bleak circumstances, so bleak that just days earlier Charlie Haughey offered his infamous and deeply hypocritical finger-wagging: "As a community, we are living away beyond our means... "