The myth makers have won and it has taken only a matter of months. The official view of modern Irish politics is that Fianna Fail took a beating in the June elections because it was too right wing. Those dangerous tendencies were personified by Charlie McCreevy, the minister for finance, who has been stripped of his cabinet post and sent to Brussels.
By the end of this month Bertie Ahern will unveil his new cabinet and there will be much mouthing of empty platitudes about social justice, social inclusion and social caring, followed some weeks later by a budget that will lob a bit more money at the health service, lift more people out of the tax net and leave enough money to dole out another round of benchmarking awards to our hard-pressed public servants.
Ministers will compete for the Big Heart award, which will go to whichever one of them utters the most banal, socially caring gibberish in any given week as Fianna Fail bows to accepted wisdom, which is that unless it shimmies to the left, wears its socially aware heart on its sleeve and genuflects to the trade unions, it will be swept aside at the next general election.
To prepare the backbenchers for the fuzziness to come, the party has invited Fr Sean Healy to address the troops this week in Inchydoney, Co Cork, as they psyche themselves up for the new term.
Healy represents the Conference of Religious of Ireland (Cori), an umbrella organisation for 125 religious groups, 18 of whom negotiated that remarkable deal with Ahern’s government that requires the taxpayer to foot most of the bill for their abuse of children in recent decades.
In Healy’s world, economic progress and tumbling rates of unemployment mean that poverty is on the rise. According to his statistics, at the start of the millennium (this one, mind), one in every four children in Ireland was living in poverty, alongside one in four households and one in every five people. Because he uses a definition of poverty that is based on a percentage of average annual income, the higher that income rises, the higher the poverty line rises. If JP McManus, the multi-millionaire gambler, lived in a country full of billionaires he would be living in relative poverty on the Healy scale.
Healy would like to see Ireland’s tax take rise, and the additional money he thinks higher taxes would bring would then be spent on reducing poverty. His view on taxation policy is captured well in his Socio-Economic Review for 2003: “In spite of dramatic cuts in taxation rates, revenue kept coming in and allowed us to record sizeable current account surpluses . . .”. He cannot accept that lower taxes might encourage economic activity and generate higher revenues; no, revenues rose in spite of tax cuts, not because of them.
His economics and his statistics are artfully constructed to paint a picture that justifies his stridency and his position at the very heart of policy formation. That would be fine if Healy was ever subjected to vigorous cross-examination, but he is not. Trawl through the electronic archive of The Irish Times and you will find more than 100 articles in recent years about (or by) Healy — or “Father Fairness” as he was dubbed in one interview. Apart from two columns by Kevin Myers in the past eight years and one small news story in which a civil servant criticised Healy’s “propagandising” there is not another hint of challenge or about his economic theories.
Similarly, if you are looking for a robust exchange of views you will listen in vain to an interview with Healy on RTE. He is one of our untouchables, a noble priest who fights for the socially excluded. No matter that what he spouts is economic nonsense and counterproductive to the cause he espouses, he has achieved an exalted position.
For once, therefore, one can only hope that Fianna Fail is engaging in its legendary cynicism by inviting him to talk to the backbenchers and no more, because the alternative is that Ahern and his colleagues have become so frightened of their own flawed analysis of what they have done wrong that they are about to embrace the ideas of a man who would, one suspects, be happier somewhere else than in a free- market republic.
Cynical or not, the decision to invite Healy to Inchydoney shows how disoriented this government has become. It confuses the spending of money with the delivery of services, believing, against all the evidence of its own administration, that one achieves the other.
The extension of that confusion is that the voters actually care about the absolute amount of money spent on health, or education, or transport when in reality voters care about the outputs, not the inputs. If services improve, if lawlessness recedes, if the economy prospers and taxes stay low, then voters are relatively happy.
Ahern, logically, should be concerned about his government’s inability to deliver improved services while spending ever more of our money, yet he is not. He knows that improvement requires confrontation, and he is confrontation-averse. Toughness and decisiveness could deal with Healy’s concerns about poverty and social exclusion without destroying the economic fundamentals on which our current prosperity has, in part, been built, but Ahern lacks those basic leadership qualities.
He could reject future benchmarking awards and direct the savings to social welfare payments. He could privatise the ESB and introduce some competition to the electricity market, and use the proceeds to ease exclusion. He could sell off Aer Rianta and Aer Lingus, allow the private sector to build a second terminal at Dublin airport and introduce competition in bus and rail while he’s at it, all the time ploughing the money raised back into the alleviation of poverty, if he so chose. He could recognise that the billions spent each year on the health service are not spent wisely or fruitfully and start the process of privatising it as well. He could express some concern that his administration seems incapable of managing a building programme, whether of a road or a limited tram service, without the costs spiralling out of control.
He could, in short, use his reshuffle to present a government focused on the delivery of an open, competitive economy with a slimmed down and more efficient public service. Instead he will attempt to conjure up a cabinet that sounds caring, spends money and offends no one. Not even, one suspects, the Progressive Democrats, who saw McCreevy as one of their own and who have sat mutely through seven years of administrative incompetence.
The Healy show should rattle the PDs, but there are precious few signs of discomfort. Under Mary Harney’s increasingly supine leadership, the party has lost its sense of drive or purpose. Unless she regenerates this month by choosing a portfolio that requires bite and bottle, the party will continue its depressing drift towards insignificance.
This should, of course, create an opportunity for Fine Gael, if only Enda Kenny, its leader, could recognise it. In a society that has tasted economic success, that knows the benefits of a low-tax regime and knows that it is better off today than it was 20 years ago, there has to be room for a political party that is prepared to stand against the consensus of the left and stand for the benefits of an open, liberal economy and society.
Fianna Fail’s inability to recognise that it has lost support because of its incompetence in government, has opened a door for Kenny to march through. The Progressive Democrats have been diminished by the Ahern administrations and have lost the will to reform. Fine Gael could provide an alternative vision of a prosperous society that created better opportunities for its disadvantaged by fostering growth, competitiveness and personal responsibility. Healy and his statistics represent the way backwards: can Kenny find the courage to point the way forward?
