Endemic localism and our whip system ends up reducing budget day to a theatrical exercise in parliamentary voting, writes ELAINE BYRNE
IT IS of course entirely coincidental that International Anti-Corruption Day falls tomorrow, the same day as budget day. By a quirky twist of fate, tomorrow is also the birthday of the deceased speaker of the US Congress Tip O’Neill, who gave us that enduring phrase: “All politics is local”.
The budget decision-making has traditionally been extremely mindful of what is known as the budgetary cycle. For instance, favourable decisions may be introduced just before an election and difficult choices are postponed until after an election. Policy may be formulated to benefit particular interest groups.
Charlie “if I have it, I spend it” McCreevy announced in his 2002 budget speech what turned out to be an uncosted and unplanned decentralisation programme. This profligate transfer of 10,000 civil and public servants from Dublin to 53 locations throughout the State paid no attention to the government’s own spatial strategy and was designed to bolster Fianna Fáil’s support in the 2004 local elections.
The cost to the exchequer of this politically motivated and grievously flawed decentralisation policy is estimated to have almost breached the €1 billion mark.
In his e-mail to the Fianna Fáil party faithful at the weekend, Brian Lenihan prepared the ground for the €4 billion in cutbacks. He wrote how “The economic future of this country is on the line” and inferred that this was because “As a small open economy, we are highly dependent on trade and on foreign investment.”
When Lenihan stands to announce the most austere budget in the history of this state at 3.45pm tomorrow, remind yourself of the €1 billion mistake made by his predecessor standing in the exact same spot.
The 2008 OECD report on the public service indirectly criticised the decentralisation programme. It described the Irish policy process as tending “to neglect the longer-term” where political concerns and electoral timeframes “crowd out longer-term interests”. and induce “short-termism”.
For instance, the early childcare supplement was introduced by Brian Cowen when minister for finance, in the run-up to the 2007 election. The Special Savings Investment Accounts (SSIA) scheme, which provided for a 12 per cent return on savings over a five-year period, matured just in advance of the 2007 general election.
The political decision-making process has been held hostage to geographically concentrated policies, political strategies targeted for specific demographic groups and tax cuts benefiting certain socio-economic interests.
This has created a compromised politics overwhelmed by conflict averse concerns. Social partnership and embedded vested interests have undermined considerations of the general interest. The Irish political system is characterised by parliamentarians who behave as local ombudsmen between Government departments and their constituents. One-third of the newly elected TDs in the 2007 election had only recently become councillors in 2004.
Recognition of the failures of the past would embrace a new approach for drawing up the budget.
The only constructive input the Opposition can make tomorrow is to adopt or reject a policy menu to which they have not contributed. The standing orders of the Dáil prevent any amendment of the estimates. Parliamentary procedures dictate that scrutiny of the budget is restricted by a time limit.
There will be no meaningful policy deliberation or any stress-testing of proposals before firm decisions are made. Evidence based policy-making which opens up decision-making to interested stakeholders and the wider public will be absent tomorrow. So too will the systematic early consideration of the benefits, costs and compliance issues of new budgetary measures.
This will always be the case because our parliamentary system is dominated by the executive and the whip system ensures that the legislature will always be limited in exercising its obligation to hold the executive to account.
Tomorrow is merely a theatrical exercise in parliamentary voting fodder.
That Fine Gael and the Labour Party both chose to present their pre-budget submissions in Dublin hotels last Friday is an indicator of how irrelevant the Dáil has become.
The Dáil is paralysed by the low expectations deliberately bestowed on it by the Government.
Unlike the US system, Irish TDs cannot individually affect legislation or get items added to legislation. Since 1923, fewer than 40 Private Members’ Bills have been enacted. In Westminster, a similar parliamentary system, 268 were ratified between 1979 and 1997.
A recent Economist Intelligence Unit report said Dáil committees do not have the necessary financial specialisation. The Public Accounts Committee has repeatedly asserted that ongoing parliamentary scrutiny of major expenditure projects is almost non-existent. Our parliamentarians are not professional financial auditors and would benefit from outside academic expertise.
The system of decision-making will remain unchanged tomorrow, despite the mistakes of the past which have consequences today.
Happy Budget Day.