With just a week of campaigning left, politicians in the two big parties are still trying to figure out what the voters are really thinking. Are health and housing the only important issues and are the state of the economy and the dangers of Brexit as immaterial as the polls suggest?
Reports from the canvass suggest that Fianna Fáil is ahead of Fine Gael but not by an enormous distance. Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe faces the challenge of trying to grab the campaign by the neck and force voters to think about what might happen if the economy is mismanaged, just as Brian Cowen did at a similar stage of the 2007 campaign.
Back then all the signs were that Fine Gael was on the cusp of coming to power having made health the dominant issue of the campaign. Cowen changed the narrative in the course of one forceful press conference and even though many in the party later came to regret it bitterly, Fianna Fáil was back for a third term.
Experience suggests some of the proposals, such as increased grants for first-time house buyers, will only make matters worse
In order to close the gap this time around, Donohoe will need to change the media narrative, which to date has emphasised the Government’s failures and ignored its achievements. Simon Coveney also has a role to play in this by letting voters know in no uncertain terms that the dangers of a hard Brexit have not gone away. Whether the two Ministers can do that in the coming days will determine the outcome of the election.
Getting voters to focus on the big issues has not been helped by the plethora of promises made by all of the parties. It raises raised serious questions about whether they have learned anything from the trauma of the financial crash a decade ago.
Damaging promises
The politicians are clearly responding to the mood they are encountering on the doorsteps and in focus groups, and promising a whole range of spending programmes focused on health and housing. The fact that experience suggests some of the proposals, such as increased grants for first-time house buyers, will only make matters worse doesn’t seem to impinge on either candidates or voters.
One of the most potentially damaging promises has been the commitment to roll back the planned increase in the pension age to 68. Sinn Féin is promising to bring it right back to 65 while Labour wants to freeze it at 66. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have also jumped into the fray with commitments on transition payments which could effectively nullify the benefits of the pension changes.
It is worth recalling that the gradual raising of the pension age was first announced in 2010 by Mary Hanafin, then minister for social protection in the Fianna Fáil-Green Party government. The first phase of the changes was then implemented by the Fine Gael- Labour government in 2014 without any great level of public controversy. The State pension age rose from 65 to 66 in 2014 and under the current plan it will increase to 67 next year and 68 by 2028.
All election promises should be taken with a grain of salt given the possibility of a hard Brexit and the likelihood of reform of the international tax code
The pension age has only become a contentious issue since the Labour Party pledged at its last party conference to freeze the age at 66 and the election campaign has triggered competitive pledges from other parties. With RTÉ fanning the flames, rational debate on the issue has gone out the window.
The sad thing about all of this is that the gradual increase in the pension age was one of the areas where politicians had engaged in sensible long-term planning. With life expectancy having risen dramatically over the past few decades, most European countries have been making plans to adjust the pension age in order to ensure that their systems are not bankrupted.
Pensions provisions
For instance, this year’s budget made provision for pensions for 677,000 people at a cost of €8.4 billion. This has been rising steadily since 2007, when it cost a little under €5 billion. On present trends, the pension system will swallow up more and more of the State’s resources in the years ahead. What this means is that there will be less money available to provide all the services from housing to education which will be required to keep younger generations in the style to which their grandparents were accustomed.
Honouring the commitments contained in programmes for government can be just as dangerous as implementing foolish election promises
All of the election promises should be taken with a grain of salt given the continuing possibility of a hard Brexit and the likelihood that reform of the international tax code will lead to a loss of billions of euro to the exchequer.
Back in the 1960s, Seán Lemass, who was one of the most successful taoisigh in the history of the State, remarked with a straight face after an election that no one expected election promises to be kept. He was widely applauded in that very different age for talking sense.
Hopefully the post-election negotiations between the parties on a programme for government, and possibly a confidence-and-supply arrangement as well, will give them a chance to ditch some of the extravagant promises but there is also a danger that some of the more lurid ones will be embraced.
Remember how the damaging commitment to abandon water charges was insisted on by Fianna Fáil in 2016. Experience has shown that honouring the commitments contained in programmes for government can be just as dangerous as implementing foolish election promises.