Budget won’t hold much by way of good news or drama
World of Politics with Harry McGee – [email protected]
A few years ago I came across an archive copy of the Irish Independent from December 1984 – the day after the Budget. There was one word that was unfamiliar to me. That was ‘billfold’, a quaint word that means wallet. The Budget was going to be hard on the billfold, said the report. Well, blow me away with a feather.
What I found extraordinary about it was that just about everything else was the kind of stuff we read when we open up our newspapers, or iPads, after the Budget has been announced.
Increases in the old reliables like tobacco and alcohol. More duty on petrol and diesel. Income tax cuts and rises. Changes to welfare, small increases in the pension, little adjustments in transaction taxes like capital acquisition tax and capital gains tax. And then the capital stuff.
The reality is since we have become part of the single currency, and bound by EU budget rules, the Budget is one of the least dramatic days of the years.
Allied to that is the Confidence & Supply agreement between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, which means that it’s all agreed weeks in advance with few surprises in the bag.
Indeed, if there are no surprises it’s usually an okay thing. We had some very exciting Budgets between October 2010 and October 2014. There were loads of things to report but none of them translated happily into people’s ‘billfolds’.
The severity of those Budgets guaranteed the electoral collapse of the Labour Party electorally. It had gone into government promising no cuts and ended up implementing the very cuts in the areas it had promised to protect.
Unfortunately for it, it had set those promises out in a graphic Tesco-type billboards on the eve of the 2011 election.
A coalition government fell in 1982 after Minister for Finance John Bruton introduced VAT on children’s shoes.
In 1987, another Fine Gael and Labour coalition fell over an austerity budget. Fianna Fáil huffed and puffed about the severity of it. However, the moment he got into office, Charlie Haughey went ahead and imposed exactly the same budget on the Irish people.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.