Honeymoon well and truly over as Coalition fights fires on all fronts

There is always a period when a new government comes into office during which the fierceness of battle is less than usual. It grew to be called “the honeymoon”, during which an incoming government could blame the outgoing for much of the difficulties – certainly the Fine Gael/Labour administration was not slow to blame Bertie Ahern and got away with it for months.

One of the kindest descriptions of this few months of amnesty has been “the honeymoon season”, so it was interesting in the past week to hear Fine Gael backbencher Brian Walsh (Galway West) concede that he thought “the honeymoon was over” and then see it confirmed in any number of places around the country, where issue have risen that simply won’t go away.

The latest of these is in the education area, where it is now quite clear that a battle is building up over the number of schools, which is based on the number of eligible pupils for the schools in each locality. The battle looks like it has the ability to cause real trouble among the ranks of TDs ... and especially amongst those of the Labour Party.

In the middle of this battle is East Galway Labour TD, Colm Keaveney, who has taken on the entire concept of changing class size numbers and changing class size eligibility – because of the danger the changes pose to schools in rural areas and in less-populated and less well-off areas.

The Irish National Teachers Organisation has been playing hardball with the Department of Education on just how many teachers should go, but there were rumours this week of hundreds of jobs to go, while the INTO was opening threatening that it would not accept the cuts.

The row over schools is clearly bringing enormous pressure on Labour and Fine Gael TDs and was the last thing they needed on a weekend when thousands of letters went out to pensioners telling them that they had underpaid on their taxes – the pensioners were mystified because many had assumed that because they were in-touch with the Department of Social Welfare,  their tax affairs were in reasonable order.

In fact, it looks like the government has pencilled-in an income of about €40 million this year from this source, but the pensioners knew nothing about it – and many of the taxpayers – until they opened their weekend post.

This controversy bears remarkable similarities to others in previous budgets when the full implications of certain measures did not become evident for some time.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.