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... "

We may not be living wildly beyond our means today but circumstances, and especially the enduring, maybe escalating, social and business uncertainties around the pandemic, are every bit as challenging. Because of that every announcement today will be measured against the tightening Covid-19 noose. This is appropriate but it should not push other issues, equally important if not as immediate, to the sidelines.

The very real possibility of a nil-all, bust-up Brexit is a well-flagged possibility. The consequences of such an implosion could well last longer than Covid-19, especially if a vaccine is found in the medium term. 

Today's budget must also move climate collapse measures from the virtue-signalling stage to the real and measurable. More prevarication, even at this difficult moment, is simply not an option. 

As the EPA has warned, Government greenwashing can no longer be a substitute for real action. Yet, despite that more-than-daunting agenda, there is more, much more. 

There are longstanding issues that must be addressed if the darkening culture wars in much of the English-speaking world, and beyond too, are not to wreak their toxic havoc in this Republic. The budget is a legitimate and effective way to address these issues if the will to do so exists - and that is still the real, still unavoidable question. 

When in opposition Public Expenditure and Reform Minister Michael McGrath persistently highlighted the gap between Irish and other EU bank rates, a disparity especially wide in the mortgage market. That fleecing continues. 

A German mortgage customer is charged interest at 1.35% while the best Irish rate is 2.85%, many people pay more. 

Over 30 years, a €300,000 loan costs an Irish customer around €80,000 more than their German counterpart might pay. How, in a single EU market, can this be?  

Will McGrath use today's opportunity to make Irish lenders reflect ECB rates or will the sore be left to fester? Might he make it possible for Irish people to take mortgages from continental lenders?

That is just one of many examples of how unchanging, top-down systems fail great swathes of people happy to commit to a largely effective, largely equitable society. 

The consequent alienation has, so far, reordered the standing of our political parties but has not yet had the impact - Trump, Brexit, Orban, Bolsanaro etc -  it has had elsewhere. To imagine it might not, would be as delusional as hoping we might escape climate change.

Just as the idea of President Trump or Brexit was laughed at before 2016, McCreevy and O'Kennedy would have laughed at the idea of Sinn Féin at 29% in an opinion poll. This figure is a long way short of the 52% - Fine Gael 35%, Fianna Fáil 17% - or 56% if the Greens' 4% is added to the coalition total recorded last week. 

However, that trajectory, and so many shifting events around the world, show that by not changing the status quo makes change inevitable.

Irish democrats will search today's budget for measures that might avert the polarisation and corruption feeding the world's culture wars.