My first test of a Budget is whether someone at my level of income benefits from it disproportionately. So far as I can judge, this Budget will increase my after-tax income by something like 6 per cent - which seems to be twice as big a benefit as I have secured from any previous Budget.
Clearly, such a huge bias in favour of the well-off is a palpable misuse of resources that could have been used to tackle more effectively the serious problems of social disadvantage. Just to take one example: if the Minister had not decided to cut the top tax rate from 46 per cent to 44 per cent, the child benefit increases could have been 2 1/2 times greater - increasing payments by £20-25 a month instead of £8-10 a month.
Alternatively, Charlie McCreevy could have diverted the money thus given away to people like myself on the higher tax rate to the worthwhile purpose of raising the standard rate band by half as much again as he has done. That would have enabled him in this Budget to move halfway, instead of only one-third of the way, towards his laudable objective of reducing to 17 per cent the proportion of tax-payers paying the top rate.
Even better, perhaps he could have concentrated available resources upon the urgent problem of over-taxed single people on low incomes by raising the PAYE allowance. The truth is that there is nothing particularly wrong with a 46 per cent top tax rate - if it be applied only to people like myself who have substantial incomes. It is true that some kind of case can always be manufactured for reducing any tax rate, but in any well-ordered society that is not governed by a self-interested wealthy element, cutting what is now a fairly moderate top tax top rate ought to have a low priority.
Another undesirable - and clearly very unpopular - feature of this Budget is the introduction of discrimination between women working at home and women going out to work. This discrimination is clearly anti-social - and, in particular, anti-marriage. Its purpose appears simply to be to encourage more women to enter the labour force, to satisfy the needs of employers, powerfully represented by IBEC.
Two points need to be made about this kind of purely economic motivation.
The first is that economics is properly concerned about means, not ends. Increased output is not an end in itself. It is, or at any rate ought to be, simply a means towards a better society.
So long as there was significant unemployment in our society, we needed to maximise economic growth to provide jobs for people, but as we approach full employment and the point of reaching the same level of living standards as the rest of the EU, we no longer need to make growth maximisation our principal aim.
Indeed, in our circumstances growth maximisation can be a perverse policy - increasing unnecessarily the strains in our economy and pressure on our over-burdened infrastructure.
It is simply turning common sense on its head to seek to push or drag more people into the work-force just to sustain economic growth for its own sake.
Instead, our aim should be to create conditions in society which will leave people free of economic pressures - such as the pressure on women to choose a life-path that does not correspond to their own aspirations. This is equally true whether those aspirations be to engage in paid work, or to look after their children at home.
A second point is that in any event in Ireland we are not faced with a problem of reluctance on the part of women to enter the labour force, requiring the introduction of exceptional incentives. The flow of women from "home duties" into the labour force is already five times greater here than in the rest of Europe.
Since 1991 the proportion of Irish women aged 15-64 in the labour force has risen by 5.4 per cent, as against 1.1 per cent elsewhere in the community.
Moreover, as Jane Suiter pointed out in Thursday's Budget supplement, adjusted for education, the number of Irish women under the age of 40 in our labour force has already attained the EU average level - and is actually higher in those under 30.
As a result of this, marriage and child-bearing have been postponed to such a degree that, as I have several times pointed out in this column, the age at which women have their first child is higher in Ireland than anywhere else in Europe, and the number of late births is rising at an alarming rate.
Charlie McCreevy has allowed his preoccupation with economics and his excessive vulnerability to IBEC influences to push policy in precisely the opposite direction to the real needs of our society.
In doing so he has shown a disturbing political insensitivity to the feelings of a large section of our population who reject the idea of discriminating against women who choose to pass up the chance to increase their family income by deciding to look after their children at home. He has alienated not only the 100,000 women actually discriminated against by his tax measure - but also, I believe, half a million other married women living at home whose family incomes leave them below the £28,000 tax threshold but who will nevertheless resent what he has done to better-off women working at home.
No doubt he might be tempted to reply that I demonstrated some insensitivity to public opinion in the January 1982 Budget - and paid a price for it, but argumentum ad hominem is a weak form of argument - and at least my motivation then was social, not economic: a concern to ensure that in the economic debacle we had inherited, the poor would not suffer.
We saw a tax on clothing as necessary to increase the purchasing power of social welfare payments. Under conditions of economic crisis, our measures increased the standard of living of social welfare beneficiaries by 8 per cent during the year that followed. By contrast, in a period of unparalleled prosperity, Charlie McCreevy's Budget will increase the purchasing power of most social welfare payments by less than 2.5 per cent).
But to return to the childcare issue. Just a year ago, at the time of the last Budget, I defended in this column the Government's decision to postpone action on the childcare issue to enable the complex issue to be teased out.
I wrote "because we are starting from scratch in relation to childcare, and are doing so at a time when an exceptional volume of additional resources are about to become available to us over the next 10 or 12 years, we have a unique opportunity to develop a childcare structure more comprehensive and more finely-honed than any of those in other European countries".
I listed the components of such a comprehensive scheme, incorporating elements of the French and Swedish systems. These components are:
1. Public childcare facilities, initially in disadvantaged areas, with fees calculated according to parents' means. Only the creation of such facilities by the public authorities will enable women in poor families, who have a much greater need of a second income than middle-class families, to take up employment. 2. A scheme to assist parents to employ child-minders at home, by way of grants or remission of social security payments. 3. An allowance to parents who prefer to look after their own children at home for the first three years (The French model includes an allowance of £300 a month, which has freed one in seven women with young children to look after them at home). 4. A right to parental leave, combined with a right to reinstatement in the position previously held or a similar one and a right to retraining with pay. 5. Four weeks parental leave for fathers - not transferable to the mother. This has been shown to have a significant effect on the quality and scale of male parenting.
EVEN with the present scale of revenue buoyancy, we could not introduce all this in a single Budget. For that reason, I suggested that it could be built up gradually over a period of years.
Not a single one of these proposals has been adopted in any form by a Government which seems obsessed with economic growth and oblivious to the need to make it possible for parents, and mothers in particular, to make their own free choices in this vital matter. Growth-centred policies appear to have replaced family-centred and child-centred policies in this State to a degree that is scarcely credible. This whole affair shows how far our system of government has moved away from the value system espoused by - even though sometimes neglected by - the Christian churches.
We know now how elements of both church and State failed miserably in the past to safeguard the rights of children. One might have thought that some lessons would have been learned from our unhappy past, but clearly they have not.
However, out of this debacle, and the popular uprising against this latest manifestation of the substitution of the economy for society as the principal object of public policy, much good may come. Recent Irish history has shown that politicians can learn from mistakes.
The mistakes of this Budget may have been big enough to produce a revolution in political attitudes to social policy. Let us hope that this proves to be the case.
Garret FitzGerald can be contacted at gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie