Well, it came a bit before the Budget, indeed it came on Tuesday. The bit where:
Mr Lenihan conceded last night that the budget would be very difficult but he forecast that, “it is going to be the last of the very difficult budgets”.
Some of you may have noticed that on matters economic Pat McArdle and I don’t see eye to eye… well, I don’t see him… he’s never seen me… or heard of me either come to think of it…
But where I do agree with Pat McArdle 100% is his thought that this is only the beginning of a process. This the ‘last of the very difficult budgets’? Not even close Minister. Not even close.
Actually my second favourite part was when Lenihan during the speech called the income levy ‘highly progressive’… you’d wonder does he understand the technical term as used in reference to taxes either… because it’s anything but.
And of all else, how come Richard Curran of the Sunday Business Post is the only one on RTÉ panel yesterday afternoon directly after the Budget speech, to actually seem to have an intuitive grasp of why all the talk about welfare and other rates going back to 2006 levels as if that were ‘easy’ was pointless since, as he noted, people had adjusted to 2008-9 rates in the meantime and such an ‘readjustment’ would incur real pain.
As it happens last night I went out for pints, first time in weeks, with a bunch of friends from national school. So, apologies if this is thin. I arrived home in time to watch Prime Time and Lenihan and Richard Bruton (who I once recall addressing a hall in Finglas in the 1980s to an – ahem – not so friendly crowd filled with us WP types, kudos to Bruton, in fairness even if I didn’t agree with him in the slightest) shout at each other. I’d love to know about the 20%, 30% wage cuts in the private sector Brian Lenihan was talking about. I have no doubt that in scattered individual case, sole traders and the like, and they have my sympathy, that has happened, but systemically? Hmmmm….
As for the guy from KPMG making the ‘comparisons’ between public and private sector workers to see how the Budget affected it… well, he couldn’t refrain from trying to drag in the pension premium (did he even listen to Lenihan’s words on the public service pensions? Apparently not), and other intangibles, i.e. people with jobs as against those who don’t… well, yes, but we could compare living people with dead, but it’s not a hugely useful way of looking at this… but he had to accept that PS workers had taken significant hits…very significant hits.
And Richard Curran, reprise, was saying that emigration was going to take place and while sympathetic seemed unable to offer options. I mean, is this how low we’ve gone as a society, that somehow seeing the export of our young is now an acceptable option? We’ve been degraded as a people and as a society. And that’s the reality of the bottom line analyses we’ve seen over the past while.
Anyhow, perhaps now the sniping at the Public Sector will end. All that can be said is that we’re looking at a society where the last twelve to eighteen months have seen, for my money, a catastrophic approach where the name of the game has been to talk about social solidarity and then to pit different sectors of the economy against each other. As someone who remains effectively outside the public sector I fear that we’ll all repent at leisure for that days work.
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