CEOs upbeat on tax cuts as Davos warms to Trumponomics –

LEO Varadkar’s ‘posh-gate’ row recalls the old music hall comic routine about the “poor toffs”. The punchline went, “They were so poor, even their butler was poor.”

We mention this to remind ourselves about perceptions in politics – their dangers and their upsides.

On Tuesday, the Taoiseach perilously thought out-loud in the Dáil about how, over the years, young people have got a deposit to buy a home, which included recourse to the “bank of mom and pop”.

Yesterday, he put out a statement explaining how he bought his own home. Contrary to some mistaken perceptions, it very definitely did not include recourse by him to the “bank of mom and pop”.

The level of detail Mr Varadkar published about how he came to buy his flat went further than many of us would go in publicly talking about our personal finances.

But the extent of the financial revelations suggested the Taoiseach felt he had some ground to make up in the public credibility stakes. He had allowed rivals style him as “a posh boy”, remote from the daily struggles of ordinary people. Not good when you rely on votes from mainly non-posh people.

The Taoiseach may or may not be posh. Just check your own prejudices on that one.

But more importantly, he might also be speaking the truth. It has, as the Taoiseach originally said, long been the case that people raised a deposit in various ways.

Yes, sometimes people have gone abroad, worked hard, paid less tax, spent little, and returned with their stash. Call it the ‘bank of Dubai’.

In other cases, they raised other loans. Call it the ‘bank we’d rather not talk about’. Sometimes, they abandoned independent living and reverted to their old room in their parents’ home. And yep, there are cases of people borrowing part or all of the deposit from their parents.

“Lots of us did,” Mr Varadkar added. That comment, we were told, related to the general rather than the personal. Well, alright so.

Those are the bare facts. But in politics it rarely takes too long for “bare facts” to be loaded with implications.

Thus, Mr Varadkar’s critics, Barry Cowen of Fianna Fáil and Alan Kelly of Labour, saw a gap and went about their political work. Their critical comments gave the little Dáil vignette a rather wide hearing.

The Taoiseach’s history lesson cast him as privileged, uncaring and remote. Never mind that the source of our housing crisis lay in errors on Mr Cowen’s party’s watch. No point asking how Mr Kelly got on as environment minister trying to resolve it.

Such political perils will recur until we build more houses.