Rhodes is burning but roads are the burning budget issue in Ireland

Rhodes is burning but roads are the burning budget issue on the Government backbenches. Budget 2024, scheduled to be announced in early October, is the set of spending decisions for the last budgetary year that this Government will preside over. They may introduce a budget for 2025 in October 2024, but its implementation will happen over the horizon of the next general election. This is the last budget for which this Government will be responsible for both cause and effect.

In terms of decisions that will have a tangible political impact, it is the moment the rubber hits the road politically. That’s the context of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s remarks on Tuesday about a new all-island rail plan making the case for more investment in roads. So much for Eamon Ryan’s new age of rail. The Fine Gael parliamentary party repeatedly shrunk in the elections of 2016 and 2020 and, riddled with retirees now, it believes, 20th century-style, that big road projects are lifeboats to keep a sinking TD afloat in a multi-seat constituency. The analysis in a swathe of Fianna Fáil is the same. The difference is that it is unclear whether they have the effective political support of Tánaiste Micheál Martin.

Varadkar’s support for roads represents the front line of the relationship between the Green Party and their Coalition partners in Government. Funding for transport in the Programme for Government is based on a 2:1 split in favour of public transport over roads. That represents a shocking dislocation of traditional expectations for roads, albeit from abysmally poor levels of investment in public transport. This is pothole politics metamorphosed into motorway interchanges for a new age. When carbon budgets were introduced and enshrined in Irish law, Ryan correctly predicted that the political crunch would be transport, not agriculture. So it will prove to be.

What is at play is an international culture war around climate change, with Irish characteristics. Assuming, as we should, that a less than absolute acceptance of the reality of a climate emergency and a readily understandable meaning of the word ‘emergency’ is a form of climate denial, then this is a continuation by other means of the politics of this climate denial. Responsibility is always to be othered, and there are any number of distractions to choose from when taking the hard political decision of allocating resources.

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Varadkar’s comment was a cut and paste from the playbook of the European People’s Party (EPP), his grouping in the European Parliament, over the Nature-Restoration Law. They fought tooth and claw from beginning to end and a version survived only by a margin of 12 votes, five of them Fine Gael MEPs. They marched to the top of the hill on the issue but ran away before the end; the Greens in the Dáil having forced the Government parties to vote for the principle of a nature restoration law at home. The base provocation and then perceived betrayal of the same interests in rural Ireland has had a political price for Fine Gael. They are smarting since.

The roads issue has its own political and cultural antecedents. TDs are the original Boys from the Blackstuff. If you can’t tarmac the roads, what exactly is your purpose? Like the EPP, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil fear competitors on their rural, populist flank. People like Michael Fitzmaurice and Marian Harkin have the potential to create a credible rural alliance that would have a wider appeal than some other rural incumbents. In any event, road candidates with even some traction can have a decisive effect on the allocation of final seats. The problem for Varadkar is that he now cannot catch up with the crowd he wants to lead.

There is no case for the prosecution that Ryan, as Minister for Transport, has not delivered for the one third of his budget promised for roads in the Programme for Government. The complaint is more nuanced. While he is struggling and at times failing to deliver progress on big public transport projects including Bus Connects and Metro, road projects included in the National Development Plan are mothballing on measly PFO (please f*** off) allocations. I apologise for the crudity, but this is the parlance of power and the ripe language in which these issues are increasingly discussed by those who wield it. Restructuring the administrative state, including An Bord Pleanála, won’t deliver much in the lifetime of this government, and that underlines the fact that deep change is always best when it has happened years before.

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So it is with decarbonisation. That’s why public transport generally, including rail, must be prioritised. Our great issues are inarguably climate change and an ageing population. We have priced people under 40 out of housing and pensions. Delay on decarbonisation as the ratio of workers to dependants shifts quickly in the wrong direction doubles down on the structural disadvantages we have baked into our system for younger people. In the meantime, there is the Armageddon of global warming itself.

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Parochial concerns about allocation for roads, and tired tropes about metropolitan Greens are funny in their way, but devastatingly serious in their consequences. They are the political context of budgetary discussions on the Government backbenches. Varadkar, in shooting from the lip again, has handed the Greens the point of difference that suits them best. He has showcased nostalgia for a world suffocating on its own emissions.