Forget about SF voters, Leo, and look after your own squeezed middle

FACED with the alarming prospect of four interest rate hikes before the year’s end, not to mention rocketing energy bills, it’s hard to get excited about the new Government measures to combat the spiralling cost of living.

The unprecedented Christmas-style welfare bonus for July and extensions to the fuel allowance – billed as likely features of the Government’s extraordinary Summer Economic statement, which is due for release before TDs scatter to the four provinces on their summer holidays – won’t be of much use to me.

They are targeted at welfare recipients and low-income groups, as a cushion against the economic winter that faces the country.

They will protect people on the poverty line from hardship, but they won’t ease the pain of the socalled squeezed middle, the sector of the population who the Tánaiste famously says ‘get up early in the morning’ and are still struggling to keep afloat.

A typical member of the squeezed middle contacted RTÉ’s Brendan O’Connor show yesterday about her ailing finances. She and her husband earned €90,000 per year between them. They had a mortgage, a child in university and they needed to keep two cars on the road in order for both to go to work. The impact of the rising fuel costs, interest rates and whatnot is that they will have no holiday this year.

You could almost hear the sighs of recognition reverberate throughout the country among households where the chief feature of their post-covid existence has been learning to cut their proverbial cloth according to their measure.

A family holiday forsaken is disappointing but it’s not the end of the world. What’s worse is the nagging fear about what happens if things keep deteriorating, if mortgage rates go sky high and the list of non-essential and luxury items to sacrifice to balance the books gets exhausted?

How will workers get to the office if the car packs in and they can’t afford another loan? How far must families fall into ‘energy poverty’ before cooking a cheap shoulder of pork in the slow cooker becomes uneconomical? Will there be a second ‘revolutionary overhaul’ of the budget process, as a Government minister calls the fast-tracking of social welfare increases so they come into effect when they are announced in the October budget to include an immediate cut in taxes or a reduction in diesel for the squeezed middle?

A favourite theme of Leo Varadkar’s, the leitmotif of his campaign for leadership of Fine Gael is the resentment of the squeezed middle who pay lots of taxes but qualify for few benefits.

He recently promised to prioritise middle-income families earning around €45,000 in the budget and during his term as Taoiseach.

‘I certainly want us as a Government, in the second half of that Government, to commit to significantly reducing the cost of living for working families and middle-income families in Ireland,’ he said. Fine words indeed but there is little trace in the details released so far about the

imminent Summer Economic Statement of the overlooked middle classes.

Perhaps that’s because the costof-living crisis has only intensified in recent weeks, whereupon Sinn Féin expertly hijacked it for its manifesto. It’s no coincidence that next month’s emergency measures emerge against the backdrop of nationwide protests organised by the Cost-of-Living Coalition.

Or that they seem tailored to quash Mary Lou McDonald’s demands for an emergency budget before the Autumn.

The Sinn Féin leader addressed the Dublin protest accusing the Government of being out of touch, with ‘no real understanding of what it means to have your back to the wall, what it means not to make the rent or the mortgage.’

McDonald’s inclusion of homeowners in her address is the latest example of her courting the middle classes, a part of the population where the party’s popularity is surging, but which may still be in two minds about voting Sinn Féin into power come election day in 2025. The latest opinion poll shows Sinn Féin support at a record high, at 37%, 14 points ahead of Fine Gael and 15 above Fianna Fáil.

AN April poll showed its popularity highest among voters between the ages of 18 and 35 years, and among the C2, D and E socio economic groups, basically low to middle-income earners.

A poll last year showed Sinn Féin the ‘leading party of middle-class Ireland’, a phenomenal achievement for a party whose singleissue United Ireland agenda gave it little appeal outside of workingclass strongholds.

The remorseless drift of middleclass support towards Sinn Féin reflects its frustration at the long-running failure to resolve the enormous problems in housing and health.

But the tide might be arrested if the Government assuaged the struggles of the squeezed middle in its emergency budget rather than focus solely on welfare recipients .

The middle classes are the Government parties’ ideological bedfellows, their natural support base yet they are ignored in the new provisions which are targeted at the poorest section of society, Sinn Féin’s core supporters who will never shift allegiance come what may.

The cost-of-living crisis hands the Government the chance to restore middle-class faith in it after its failings in housing and health.

On what we see so far, it seems set to become another wasted opportunity.