Paddy Logue: Watch the Coalition fill every pothole all across the land

Former Fine Gael strategist Frank Flannery told radio listeners recently that Fianna Fáil, with its current policies, were "slipping back into their bad old ways". They want to "remove this charge and cut back on that tax and the old populism seems to be very near the surface there", said Flannery during an interview on RTÉ's Morning Ireland on July 21st. Maybe he was just having a laugh with us or checking if we were awake (it was about 8am). Maybe he just hasn't noticed that his friends in the ruling party in Government are gearing up to deliver a pre-election budget that might even make former Fianna Fáil minister for finance Charlie McCreevy blush.

Talk about pot calling the kettle black; having spent the last number of years implementing many of the policies put in place by Fianna Fáil and the troika, Fine Gael and Labour are now attempting to frantically sprinkle some magic pixie dust on the nation ahead of the 2016 general election. Mind you, it just might do the trick on an electorate that put Fianna Fáil back in power over and over again until the country went down the tubes.

Of course, Fine Gael are spinning that they are going to “give back” to those who have “given most” during the recession. It is being pitched as a “fair recovery”. All of which sounds fair enough, and Michael Noonan has been pointing out that the “budgetary space” is still as tight as a duck’s posterior and there will certainly be no giveaway budget. But the thing about ducks is that you can recognise them both by the way they walk, the way they quack and the way they waddle their little tails. Dead giveaway.

Scratch the surface even a little and you can see the Fine Gael / Labour duck buttering up the country for votes as the general election looms early next year. The time left for spreading the good news is running out but they are doing a pretty good job.

It started with the Spring Statement at the end of April designed to remind the nation what an excellent job the Coalition was doing and foreseeing just how wonderful they would be if re-elected. A five-year plan on income tax and the USC was unveiled, or talked about at least.

The budget is not far away, coming up in October, in which there will be something for everybody in the audience. The USC will be cut by at least 1 per cent, “or maybe a bit more” Michael Noonan recently winked and whispered, the way that he does, with one eye on the election in “two-sixteen”, as he would say himself. Joan Burton, meanwhile, wants € 5 put on the child benefit, which amounts to 60 quid a year per child, or about two really nice bottles of wine, and a slab of beer, including taxes and levies.

Capital spending plan

Brendan Howlin’s capital spending plan, an announcement of which is imminent, will surely allow the ministers and TDs to fill potholes, both actual and metaphorical, all across the land in the run-up to the general election.

And as if all that wasn’t enough, the public service already has “pay restoration” to look forward to, or as it’s called in the private sector “a pay rise”, yes, yes, following several pay cuts and “increased productivity”. And who could blame the public sector, the Croke Park hour has taken its toll on them surely. In the private sector, by the way, it’s called eating your lunch at your desk four days out of five. But that’s a different column.

The low paid haven’t been forgotten either, with a dizzying increase of 50 cent per hour on the minimum wage, and don’t forget the promise of a property tax freeze in 2017 and talk of extra parental leave for “hard-pressed families”.

And when the full horror of the crash, and Fianna Fáil’s role in it, is finally revisited for people in the banking inquiry, the only question left to ask will be: how could you not re-elect this government? Never mind the detractors (the Fiscal Council and the ESRI to name a few), I don’t know why they just don’t go and, well, vote for somebody else and save their cribbin’ and moanin’ for newspaper columns and, most importantly, for the election.

At local level now, the stage is set and the parties will be gearing up. They no doubt have already started salivating over leaflets claiming credit for speed bumps and footbridges and school buildings and the upcoming extra cash Enda and Joan will be putting in people’s pockets early next year, and they will fumble in the greasy till of elections until voters hit the polls. I’ll be laminating my list of questions for when the candidates call. Top of the list will be a question about the Coalition pledge in February 2011 that “old ways, the old politics that created the crisis” would be changed. And the question will be simple: has anything really changed?