Two excellent questions have been raised and three key speeches delivered this month. The questions were posed by Jim O'Leary of Davy Stockbrokers on July 3rd. "Will it be acceptable to the citizens of Ireland that current spending growth is [arbitrarily] limited to 4 per cent per annum at a time when the economy continues to boom? On the other hand, what purpose is to be served by tax rates at the level that would deliver the kind of surpluses?" possibly as high as £3.3 billion in 1999.Gordon Brown delivered a large and punchy "comprehensive spending review" on July 14th. A day later, Ruairi Quinn gave the full background, including O'Leary's statistics, to his proposal for a "decade of investment". Mary Harney set out her matter of fact, untitled approach to tax cuts on July 17th.What is fascinating is the areas of commonality and the differences in the speeches. There are some startling contrasts between Brown and Quinn, and remarkable similarities between Quinn and Harney. It was Quinn who said forcefully that it was "obscene that young single workers below the average industrial wage pay income tax at the higher rate". Two days later, Mary Harney said a tax system that has a person entering the top band at £268 per week "is in need of change".Quinn said this year's budget "should unashamedly concentrate on removing thousands of low paid PAYE taxpayers out of the income tax net entirely". Harney wants "to see a budget that takes as many people as possible out of the tax net".

Spot the difference? The context changes everything. Mary Harney sees tax cuts as supporting partnership and promoting the basic social inclusion of having a job. Quinn provides an answer to Jim O'Leary's questions: "One option would be to simply continue to reduce our debt and reduce our taxes" which would, he says, maintain 25 per cent of the population below the poverty line, and leave 100,000 permanently condemned to long-term unemployment. But nowhere in his speech does he connect this supposedly bad option, which includes tax cuts, with his own idea of removing thousands of low paid people from the tax net. How many thousands? At what wage level? If all the budget surplus cannot be devoted to such tax reform, how much? Gordon Brown's speech was of a different order to those of our two politicians, and understandably so. It was the defining speech of a Finance Minister, looking forward to being able to implement every single proposal. It was actually about investment, he claimed, investment in health, education, crime reduction, communities, family support and overseas aid. Quinn echoed the theme of investment, concentrating on education and particularly on infrastructure. But Brown's whole approach, and even the turns of phrase, are very different. He has made it a fundamental policy that investment in public services is in return for modernisation, reform, and the achievement, not mere statement, of measurable targets in public services. Consider whether we, not just the Irish Labour Party, are ready for public hospitals being required to publish league tables measuring the success rates of treatments. And will we see numeracy and literacy targets for 11-year-olds in our schools? Quinn speaks of abolishing poverty, Brown of "reforms that will help alleviate poverty". Quinn says we could provide "full employment"; that phrase never made it to Brown's speech. Brown bases his new deal for the unemployed "on opportunities matched by responsibilities". This was echoed in Mary Harney's words about our "responsibility to help people move off the Live Register. . . equally, the unemployed also have a responsibility to participate in our supports."Brown is enthusiastic about public-private partnerships for funding capital projects, but so far Quinn is only ready to contemplate pension fund investment. Brown barely, if at all, mentioned "fairness", Quinn repeatedly did, but Mary Harney, like to others, emphasised "social inclusion". Quinn alone mentions anti-competitive, rigid practices in the private sector, such as among doctors and lawyers, and one can't imagine Brown or Harney disagreeing.Despite all the differences in tone and approach, the odds are that policy on tax reform, public spending against targets and private funding will converge. It will happen because most voters, in Ireland and Britain, seem to want a mixture of relatively low taxes, opportunity to increase personal wealth and a society that is fundamentally decent. The peddling of false dichotomies will be punished, and most speech writers know it.