Budget must start to rebuild hope and revive our communities

It was a weekend of positive and reassuring mood music.

So why am I anxious? There’s a new air of optimism, even the beginnings of confidence, about. Why would that make me afraid?

Fine Gael were in great form at their annual conference over the weekend. If there was anyone sitting there wondering why the party leader and Taoiseach had managed to blow a referendum on a key personal commitment the week before, they were far too polite to say so. Indeed it was quite remarkable how the Seanad referendum appeared to be air-brushed out of the story that Fine Gael had to tell.

Away from the smug certainties of the Fine Gael conference, business, it seemed, was being done around Government Buildings. A smiling and happy James Reilly arrived for a tête-à-tête with Brendan Howlin, looking for all the world as if Brian Lenihan Snr had been put in charge of the Department of Health (“Problem? What problem?”).

At the end of the Cabinet meeting on Sunday night, the rumour machine went into overdrive, where it will stay until the budget speeches are finished later this afternoon. Then the political correspondents will immediately forget the things they predicted wrongly, and in their haste to tell us who won and who lost in the political battles over the budget will also forget to tell us what it all really means.

But we’re assured it won’t all be a horror story. We’ll be reminded again that we’re going to exit the bailout on Dec 15, and that the people of Ireland have played their part — and no small part at that — in Ireland’s recovery. There’ll be gasps of horror from the opposition at some of the bad news, and hearty applause from Government backbenches at any good news. Personally, I’m hoping that Michael Noonan and Brendan Howlin can be persuaded to deliver their speeches in plain English — is there any possibility we could avoid references to financial envelopes or forensic drilling down?

And side by side with all of that, there’s an increasing sense, every time you turn on the radio, that some people at least are beginning to sound pretty pleased with themselves. I heard a bank economist on Morning Ireland early on Monday morning talking about bullish confidence, and he was almost immediately followed by an ad break that featured the resurgence of property ads from all our leading auctioneers (they’ve been hoarding their advertising budgets for a while now, and have clearly decided it’s time to splash out).

So why be afraid? I know we’re not allowed use the phrase associated with Brian Lenihan Junior that “we’ve turned the corner”. But we’re on the way back, right? We’ve recovered our economic independence, right? As Enda said at the weekend, we’re looking to the future, where we all have to live.

And I’m up for economic recovery, just as much as any other citizen. Indeed I hope that this Government can claim a genuine place in history by being the Government that inherited a woeful mess, the product of immense political failure, and actually cleaned it up. That in itself would be an achievement of extraordinary magnitude, which would make a lot of the pain we have all endured worthwhile.

But here’s the thing. We had a two-speed bubble, and we had a two-speed crash. The last thing we need is a two-speed recovery.

Let me explain. Throughout the so-called golden years, when wealth was being piled up all over Ireland, there were communities and families that it simply passed by. We invested everything we could in bricks and mortar; we piled in tax incentives to give the wealthy every opportunity to become wealthier. They flew in their helicopters and drove in their BMWs past housing estates whose names were synonymous with poverty and disadvantage before the Celtic tiger began. Those communities became more and more rooted in disadvantage with each passing year.

The reason was simple. We invested in bricks and mortar all right, but we never invested in human capital. We drove welfare supports up in election years, and cut them back as soon as the election was over. Our education system, especially where it could transform the lives of younger children, was largely ignored. We paid lip service to the idea of eradicating poverty, but the official statistics of people living in dire poverty barely ever wavered.

And then it all collapsed. Oh sure, there was a price to be paid for economic and political failure, and we all paid it. But those who had least have been forced, throughout the period of austerity, to carry really heavy burdens. There are communities throughout Ireland now, the same communities, where hope is the thing that carries the heaviest premium.

They are the communities that are looking to today’s budget for a signal. A signal that as we begin to recover — if we are beginning to recover — they won’t be forgotten. The “bullish confidence” of the financial markets waiting for Ireland’s re-entry can’t be the only beneficiaries.

There was a headline in one of the weekend papers saying “Fine Gael to tackle Burton over welfare traps”. Enda said it in his Ard-Fheis speech – “We will overhaul our welfare system to make sure people have both the support and the incentive to get back to work.”

There first is jobs and decent incomes. The second is to cut welfare. In the middle there is the idea of a flexible and supportive welfare system, couple with a wide variety of choices around education, training, and self-development. That’s the way the Scandinavians do it. They hate seeing people idle and dependent, so they insist that if you’re unemployed you must be doing something worthwhile to get the dole. But they provide an array of choices, something we’ve never done.

Our approach has been to cut welfare. The most obvious, and damaging, has been the cuts to child benefit and other means of child support. There is little doubt in my mind that Joan Burton has been under pressure to do more of that, to generate yet more massive savings in a social welfare budget that’s already under terrible strain.

My sense, right now, is that she has won that battle this time. If that’s so — and we’ll all know later today — we should be grateful to her. Another cut in child benefit would drive many families over the edge. There are too many hungry children in Ireland as it is.

What I want out of the budget speeches today is no self-congratulation. I want a real recognition that the fabric of Irish society has been damaged by the neglect of the good years and the austerity of the bad years.

I want to see the beginnings of economic recovery, for sure, but not just for its own sake. There’s a lot that needs to be rebuilt in Ireland — not just roads, not just banks. We need to start rebuilding hope too, and if the seeds of that are visible in the budget, I’ll put up with a bit more hardship. But I’ll be a bit less afraid.