No Irish government in the history of the State has been able to kick off an election campaign with a giveaway budget on the scale unveiled on Tuesday by Jack Chambers and Paschal Donohoe. The big question is whether it will pave the way for the return of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to government, with or without the Greens.
On the face of it, the budget should propel the two big parties into an unassailable position, particularly in light of the most recent Irish Times poll which put Fine Gael on 27 per cent of the vote with Simon Harris easily the most popular party leader.
If the election result is anything like the poll, Fine Gael will win about 50 seats, with Fianna Fáil winning more than 40. That would give the two parties a clear majority in the expanded 178-member Dáil. However, as the outcome of the last general election in 2020 showed, campaigns can take on a life of their own and there is no guarantee that the post-budget mood will hold until the contest comes to a head in November.
At one level there is an uncanny resemblance between October 2024 and October 2019. Five years ago, Fine Gael was also riding high on 29 per cent of the vote and party head Leo Varadkar was easily the most popular leader. Three months later, the party crashed to third place in terms of the popular vote after a disastrous campaign in January and February of 2020.
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Yet there are some important differences between then and now. This time around, Simon Harris is clearly not going to make the same mistake as Varadkar did and allow undue caution to hold him back from a November election. He has done his homework and knows that the record of governments in winter elections has been woeful over the decades.
While there is still a bit of a mystery about the exact date, everything has been carefully set up for the Taoiseach to call an election after he returns from his White House meeting with President Joe Biden the week after next. With the budget bonanza beginning to trickle through to households, the Coalition will be ideally placed to try to keep the focus on the positive aspects of its record during the three weeks of campaigning.
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The finances of the State are currently in an extraordinary position and the three Government parties can take some of the credit for that, although a large dollop of luck – in the form of the new international rules on tax and the Apple judgment – have made a huge contribution to the bulging exchequer coffers.
There was remarkable contrast between the favourable outlook facing Chambers about how to distribute the unprecedented largesse and the grim options facing UK chancellor of the exchequer Rachel Reeves about which public spending programmes to cut and which taxes to raise.
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Our other big neighbour, France, is also in an unenviable financial position. As Chambers and Donohoe delivered their budget speeches, the newly installed French prime minister, Michel Barnier, was alerting his National Assembly to the unpalatable budget choices facing his administration. “The sword of Damocles hanging over us is our colossal financial debt,” Barnier said in a keynote speech to parliament, adding that his government was planning big spending cuts as well as asking big companies making large profits to pay more in tax to fund the recovery. Implementing deep cuts without sparking large protests and riots across France will be extremely difficult, but if anybody can do it Barnier can.
One of the things the Government here has going for it is that the main opposition party, Sinn Féin, has shown no signs of recovery since its disastrous local and European elections in June. If anything, things have got worse with the party under pressure on a number of fronts as it struggles to recover lost ground.
Criticising a generous budget for not being generous enough wasn’t exactly a strong card, even if it was the only one to play.
The finances of the State are in an extraordinary position and the three government parties can take some of the credit
A more potent criticism came from the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (Ifac), which suggested the budget splurge risked repeating the mistakes of the Celtic Tiger era. However, the criticism lost some of its potency in light of the fact that it has issued similar warnings for the past few years and so far, at least, the worst has not happened.
Harris probably struck a chord with the public when he remarked: “I make no apology, none whatsoever, for giving people a little bit of their own money back between now and Christmas.” The extra €2,000-€3,000 in the pocket of many middle-income workers with children was the result. The Government parties would have suffered a deserved backlash if they had not rewarded middle-income families who have had to endure Covid and the subsequent cost-of-living crisis.
In any case, out of the €25 billion surplus, some €16 billion went on long-term infrastructure projects and savings. The day will certainly come when current spending will have to be curtailed but it was unrealistic to expect a government with a record budget surplus to exercise prudence on the eve of an election.