The Government is playing a dangerous game in inflating public expectations

If you like Government by half measures, ours would be re-elected in a landslide. The €6.7 billion budgetary package announced on Monday is a half measure not because it is measly but because it falls between two stools. It fails to meet the expectations, which the Government, especially its leaders, stoke. The dangerous game of political indiscipline being played at Cabinet has inflated expectations, not managed them. The economic Ministers Paschal Donohoe and Michael McGrath are probably pleased that they held off the worst marauding of their leaders. Upward pressure on spending within government comes from the top.

It was always thus. Party leaders are in charge of elections. Usually they survive only so long as they have utility. Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Leo Varadkar bucked that trend spectacularly after a disastrous election in 2020. Varadkar especially is profligate, and wildly undisciplined with promises that require public money. This licenses others at the Cabinet table to follow suit. Ultimately it creates expectations the Government cannot meet. It makes them a main author of the public disappointment strangling the Government politically.

Public talk of billions is an economic laxative. Few of us have familiarity with such sums. Some of us must pause to do the arithmetic to realise that a billion is a thousand million. That’s more than 430 times Wednesday night’s lotto jackpot of €2.3 million. In an atmosphere where billions are tossed around casually in the public conversation, everything seems possible. This was reinforced by the magic-money-tree economics of the pandemic. Money was simply printed by central banks, in our case the European Central Bank. Now that the punch bowl is being taken off the table and as sobriety sets in, the debris is apparent.

If €6.7 billion seems a lot of money, and it is, it is even less able to meet expectations than a cursory glance might lead you to think. About €3 billion of that is what is required to pay for what has already been announced, plus increases needed to maintain existing services. Another billion is for a likely public-sector pay increase, but only if the line is held. A further billion is for a tax package that will fall far short of what the Tánaiste’s musings have led us to believe is possible. That leaves €1.7 billion for really new expenditure or about 740 Wednesday night lotto jackpots. In a country where there is expectation of one for everyone in the audience, this is chicken feed. If the good fortune of our corporation taxes diminishes even slightly, it will in hindsight, however, seem outrageous prolificacy. This is the half measure a Government that has lost the art of storytelling has walked itself into.

In the face of pushback, historian Corinne Fowler is trying to open minds to Britain’s legacy of slavery

---

Distinctively Irish, creatively modern: Roy Foster on Sarah Purser, the most successful portrait painter of her day

---

Paul Howard: I never loved an animal as much as I loved Humphrey. For 13 and a half years, he was my constant companion

---

Maureen Dowd: Joe Biden is jeopardising the democracy he wants to save

---

Varadkar will not face charges arising from his passing a confidential document to a friend who was head of a representative body. Nor should he. As taoiseach then, he was properly the arbiter of what information is given to who. The real betrayal of the public interest was his casual announcement in a recent interview that the 5 per cent pay increase offered by Government to public servants, on top of the 2 per cent they have in hand in their existing deal, should be topped up again. At €250 million for pay and another €30 million in consequential pension increases for every 1 per cent given, that was an expensive soundbite. It will be paid for either in debt or diminished services. But it is a symptom of underlying causes in a Government visibly tiring and sinking in the polls.

In scale, Martin’s abandonment of long-held plans to increase eligibility for the State old-age pension to 67, and then 68, was more outrageous, but less surprising. It is the last remnant of a brief but short-lived burst for reform after the economic crash, and now it is buried. It is another example of how, without realising what it is losing, nor indeed even thinking of it, Government parties camp on ground chosen by Sinn Féin and the left. But of the left, only Sinn Féin will likely benefit electorally.

Martin’s manoeuvre on pensions joins Sinn Féin in attacking the young. It suits everyone over 50 but if you are under 40 it’s an onslaught. Forty years ago there were five workers for every pensioner. It’s 4.5 to one now. By 2031 this is projected to become 3.5. By 2051 it looks like being 2.3. The Taoiseach was busy appeasing his parliamentary party. Outside in a real world the Economic and Social Research Institute pointed out the obvious in a chilling report. With falling levels of home ownership and more pensioners renting in old age, the difficulty making ends meet increases at a time of life when you can least bear the stress.

In 2010, Martin’s Fianna Fáil colleague Mary Hanafin launched the pensions policy now being abandoned. Her successor, Labour’s Joan Burton, delivered on it. Abandoning it was Labour’s star turn at the last election. They turned up political heat that combusted them electorally because Sinn Féin made all the gains. This Government continues to feed that bonfire.

Storytelling is the great art of politics. Hope is the punchline. What is on offer instead is measly managerialism, served in increments. There is no courage to challenge Sinn Féin, so the centre competes as a pale imitation. It assumes appeasement is the only route to popularity, so nobody challenges the received wisdom.