Kathy Sheridan: Finland’s clubbing PM would not last long in Ireland

When Finland’s prime minister went clubbing till 4am and left one of her two work phones at home, so missing the text saying she needed to quarantine after coming into contact with her Covid-afflicted foreign minister, we can assume that being barely 36 and marking two years in the top job on the country’s independence day weekend gave her a yen for a dance and a beer.

Sanna Marin didn’t pull those excuses when pictures appeared of her in Butcher’s in a cool black outfit, bottle of Corona in hand, and nor should she have.

She has steered Finland with assurance through the pandemic, resulting in some of the lowest infection rates in Europe with roughly 200,000 cases and 1,420 deaths in a population about the same size as Ireland’s. But numbers are climbing and she was aware of the close contact before the outing.

She began by equivocating, saying she got incorrect guidance (Finland has separate guidelines for government ministers and employees), before conceding she should have given it more thought.

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How would 'neutral' Ireland respond to non-aligned Finland's order for 64 new fighter jets costing €10 billion? Or to universal conscription under the constitution ?

If politicians and other luminaries have learned anything from the pandemic, it is surely that when your judgment is (legitimately) called into question, you put your hands up unequivocally then hope your hard-earned capital as an otherwise responsible, decent human being kicks in.

Marin will survive this joust. On social media, other 30-somethings marvelled at her ability to stay awake until 4am, while “clubbing with the Finnish PM” was added to bucket lists around the world.

Finns take their social responsibilities seriously but they are also the country (tied with Denmark) that gets drunk most in the world and regrets it least, according to the 2021 Global Drug Survey.

Finns said they get drunk about 24 times a year and spend about 17 per cent of the time regretting it. The Irish by contrast claim to get drunk less often than the Finns but top the world for regrets (also known as The Fear) 30 per cent of the time. Which is remarkable.

Based on the response to Tanaiste Leo Varadkar’s downtime at a (legal) music festival while in London on official business in September, we can speculate about the reaction if he was spotted swigging beer in similar circumstances to Marin. Or as one Irish tweeter put it: “Yes, I think Marin is a bit of a legend. Yes, I’d be disgusted if Leo Varadkar did the same. It’s called being a bit of a hypocrite.”

Of course Marin also attracted some blowback at home, of a kind that would be more familiar to Irish politicians: a muddle of complaints about high taxes and comparisons of Covid restrictions to ancient Roman slavery blended with “restrictions for the plebs, party for the elite” laments. But it’s safe to say that the Irish version would be more vicious with a garnish of homophobia.

And there are plenty who stand ready to explain why our politicians deserve it while Marin does not. Finland topped the world’s happiest nation list for the fourth year running, according to the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Then again Ireland came 13th, which suggests that we are possibly more content with our lives than advertised if we could only get to grips with a few headmelting issues. But even the Finns with their remarkably female, young government and their acclaimed education, housing and childcare systems, are sceptical about that UNDP happiness index.

Frank Martela, a philosopher at Aalto University noted that they were not too happy about it. “The main emotion people had was: ‘No, that can’t be true, there must be something wrong with the methodology’”, he told the Times of London. “I guess we have a bit of a melancholic self-image that we like to listen to a very heavy-metal kind of music or tales about far-distant lands we never go to or people we will never meet again.” This is the country with everything, remember (if you discount the long dark nights). Santa even lives there.

We should be so lucky. But how would “neutral” Ireland respond to non-aligned Finland’s order for 64 new fighter jets costing €10 billion? Or to universal conscription under the constitution ?

And then there are the taxes. In 2020, Finland had the fifth highest tax wedge (a measure of the tax on labour income) in the OECD.

What is interesting is the share-out between government and local authorities. Of a salary of €40,000, the income tax take is about €2,700, but local income tax adds €8,000. Typically there is also a daily allowance contribution of €544; medicare premium, €272; pension insurance, €2,860; unemployment insurance, €560; public broadcasting tax, €163; and church tax, €640. All of which adds up to €15,680 or 39.2 per cent, leaving net pay of €24,230. An employer payment of €7,592 puts the effective rate at nearly 50 per cent.

But Martela reckons that Finns are actually quite satisfied with life despite the self-image. It may be that societies whose citizens trust one another enough to shell out a large share of income in taxes know they will get pretty good public services in return. And that a murderous socialist vs capitalist civil war (in 1918) eventually settled the argument, leading to the post-war creation of the Nordic social contract.

Does all that get Sanna Marin off the hook? Her coalition is rocky and opinion polls show her Social Democrats lying in third place below the liberal-conservative National Coalition and the right-wing populist Finns party. Political capital only goes so far, even in the world’s happiest country.