Some wag mentioned Harry Potter on Wednesday, and since then the moniker is making Mr McCreevy's Budget measures appear rather more affectionate and guileless than they are. It is certainly true his book balancing involves magical thinking. The shame is that children won't share the sprinkling of magic dust in equal measures.
In this, the second year of Mr McCreevy's three-year plan to invest £1 billion pounds in child benefits, the money continues to be directed exclusively through the children's allowance scheme. The scheme has been turned into a one-stop shop for everything from childcare costs to child poverty and health. But if we were to do it all again, as the song went, would we? Or has its real potential been dissipated for political gain?
Such massive expenditure on children should have enabled significant changes in their welfare and status. It should have created a fairer environment for children, as compared with what went before. Yet two-thirds through the timescale, the principal challenges concerning children, and by association parents, are urgent as ever: child poverty, childcare, child welfare.
Absolute measures have improved; relatively, things have hardly changed at all. The child of a parent on a minimum wage remains deprived of a medical card. The child of a parent earning £100,000 a year continues to receive the same allowance as the child of a parent earning less than £10,000.
This year the betting tax came down to only 2 per cent, but the tax on parents in paid employment remains high as ever. A working parent of young children must earn an average £700 a month in gross income just to pay childcare costs.
Weirdly, the less you earn, the more this tax-in-kind reduces your gross pay. You don't have to be a betting man or woman to gamble that childcare providers will raise their fees as soon as they can because the children's allowance increase is so well trumpeted.
The Government, of course, argues that it is being generous to parents.
Increases of £25 a month in children's allowances next year are supposed to show how family-friendly they are, how committed to children, how understanding of the stresses and pressures contemporary living brings. Most of all, they are supposed to encourage voters to return Mr McCreevy to office so that in the plan's final year, he can put everything to right with a final, dramatic sleight of hand. But to prove its credentials the Government has seriously abused two primary conduits of pro-child and pro-family policy: the children's allowance and the social insurance fund. Peter is robbed to pay Paul, and Paul won't ever give it back.
People kickstarted the three-year plan by rebelling over the partial individualisation measures in the 1999 Budget - partial in the sense that while the tax system was to be reformed, the social welfare system remained as was. Money has been thrown at some of them since, but without any clear objectives against which to measure its effect.
The same people might now ask themselves whether the extra money in children's allowances is actually "shut up" money, and is achieving its aim. Most parents can use an extra £25 a month, whatever their particular circumstances, yet there is a basic absence of fairness in giving everyone the same amount when few other balancing factors come into play.
The Government has consistently objected to having a multi-layered child benefit and welfare approach on the basis that it would be unfair. This way, parents are able to maximise their choices, they say, which furthers equality.
But ignoring how much people earn, or how old their children are, is not fair. It is simply convenient in political terms because it avoids some fundamental and hard strategic choices by Government, not parents.
A stark example is the tiny increase of £8 a week to lone parents. On the very same day Mr McCreevy announced it, his colleague MichΘal Martin was telling Opposition deputies they must look at the Human Life in Pregnancy Bill within the context of the forthcoming Crisis Pregnancy Agency.
Logic alone dictates that a Government intent on providing a more child-friendly environment will do everything it can to better the economic circumstances into which children conceived in crisis are born. But the prospect for a baby born to a lone parent in nine months' time is grim. Robbing the social insurance fund limits the parent's chances of spending time with the child as an infant because the Government has compromised parental leave. Secondly, the Government's failure to resolve the shortage of child care places for infants means the mother may have to stop or reduce her hours of work.
If she manages to stay in the workforce, she won't be eligible for a medical card and will have to forage alone once her small quota of free doctor visits is exhausted. If she does not, her child immediately joins the most disadvantaged group in Irish society.
Like the Harry Potter phenomenon, there is a wealth of marketing underneath the magician's cloak - a billion pounds' worth. Yet a child of modest means can't get a medical card, and a child born to a lone parent is still destined to disadvantage.
mruane@irish-times.ie