Fintan O’Toole: Ireland is excruciatingly slow to use public money to help ordinary people

Last week, in the budget, the Government introduced two changes that were hailed in media reports as “landmark” decisions. It promised €30 million to pay for IVF treatments in the public health system. It also found €47 million to fund free books for primary school pupils.

These are very welcome moves. They will make life better for a lot of ordinary people, and make society as a whole that bit more decent and equal.

But they’ve been a hell of a long time coming. They are things we “couldn’t afford” for ages, even though most Irish people would agree that a wealthy democracy should be able to make sure that kids have schoolbooks and that a woman’s chances of having one of those kids should not depend on how much money she has.

When it comes to using public money to help ordinary people in such ways, the State is ultra-cautious. For campaigners (and for well-disposed politicians and civil servants) getting obvious decisions through the system makes Sisyphus look a slacker.

The schoolbooks’ saga illustrates how this all works. The children’s charity Barnardos has been campaigning on this for well over a decade, and producing estimates of the relatively trivial cost to the Exchequer that no one has ever contested.

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It’s hardly a radical policy. Children in Northern Ireland have had free schoolbooks since 1947. And, actually, when the national school system was initially established in Ireland in the mid-19th century, textbooks were supplied without charge.

But just reaching to the point of actually doing this obvious thing has been excruciating. In January 2020, the then minister for education Joe McHugh announced a fabulous initiative: “a new €1 million fund which aims to provide free books in primary schools”. There are no missing zeros and this was not a joke. One million euro – a rounding-up error in what was then a budget of €70 billion.

What was this money for? A “pilot programme” to be rolled out in DEIS schools only. Why on earth did we need to pilot a programme that has been operating successfully across the Border for three-quarters of a century? The idea that the State has to test the waters very, very carefully before embarking on such a basic provision is absurd.

The IVF story is broadly similar. Ireland and Lithuania are the only EU countries that do not provide these treatments through their public health systems.

Just before Christmas 2019 the then minister for health Simon Harris announced that Ireland would now do so at last. But he warned: “Realistically I think you’re looking at 2021 in terms of IVF being available through the public health service and being publicly funded.” It didn’t happen in 2021. It has now been announced again last week – but only to come into effect in phases from September next year. (The actual budget allocation is just €10 million to cover the last four months of next year.)

Now, one might accept all of this stinginess if it were evidence of extreme prudence with public money. This is admittedly a bit of a stretch since the sums involved are small and the policies are in no way innovative.

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But, in any case, it’s nonsense. There is no extreme prudence with public money. We’re still living, for example, with the costs of an astonishingly reckless bailout of dead banks. That policy was supposed to cost us, according to Merrill Lynch, who were the government’s advisers at the time, between €6.5 billion and €16.4 billion. Last week the Comptroller and Auditor General put the current net cost at €45.7 billion.

We forked out most of that (€37.3bn) to “save” Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide, both of which were obviously beyond saving. (Imagine what Ireland would be like now if that money had been spent on a programme of building high-quality public housing.)

All that, you may say, is in the past. But it isn’t. We still have to service the debt the State took on to fund this madness. The €30 million the State now intends to spend on IVF treatments is the same sum it will spend this year just to pay the interest on the money it borrowed to put into one little building society, Permanent TSB.

The cost of the free schoolbooks for primary school kids is less than one tenth of what we are paying this year (and every year) in interest on borrowings for Anglo and Nationwide.

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These expenditures are scarcely even noticed. They are not up for debate. No one really has to account for them.

Equally strange, though, is that “public money” has become a floating, unpredictable idea. Cliff Taylor reckons that since 2015 the Exchequer has received about €30 billion in corporation tax that it did not anticipate. In that context, a few tens of millions for things like schoolbooks or IVF treatments are close to being immaterial. The impact on the public finances is minuscule.

And yet they take years and years and tears and tears. The big numbers for the big people pass us by in a flash. The little ones for the little people have to be squeezed out of the system euro by euro.