Hot shaves, long fingers and ‘human reduction’

WILL somebody please think of the children? Paschal Donohoe’s bold boast yesterday that Ireland is ‘one of the best places in the world to be a child’ was always going to be a claim too far for the Opposition and a range of interest groups on social media.

But for the afternoon that was in it, the fact that Michael McGrath’s and Paschal Donohoe’s children were front and centre in the public gallery gave Mr Donohoe’s words a particular cruelty. Imagine getting a day off school for this?

If the kids were promised rollercoasters, then they didn’t even get a waltzer. Very little in this Budget was box-fresh on the day, so the traditional dance of hollers of outrage, random bursts of applause and high-dudgeon rebuttals never materialised.

The conspicuous display of affection for Mr McGrath’s first Budget as Finance Minister – with the entire Fianna Fáil back bench taking to their feet for a standing ovation – might have been a surprise, but with the Dublin Theatre Festival in full swing, this was probably the least dramatic performance in town.

Admittedly, Mr McGrath’s promotion to headline act did see him punch up his usually underwhelming delivery. But with Paschal’s lips visibly moving from time to time during his colleague’s speech, it wasn’t entirely clear whose lines these were anyway.

Still, there were – widely flagged – reasons to be cheerful, especially for Fianna Fáil, who were acutely aware this may well have been the last budget before the general election, and the last time they took the lead on Budget Day was when poor Brian Lenihan had to deliver a brutally austere package of bad news.

Yesterday, the only obvious cuts were to McGrath’s and Donohoe’s hair, with the pair sporting identical styles that made us wonder if they’d spent the morning together at the barber’s.

It’s not so long since the historic rivals made for uneasy Coalition partners: now, it looks as if they’re sharing hot shaves.

And that’s not all. This viewer’s unreliable memory suggests it was Michael Noonan who set the trend for abbreviating dates and numbers in the budget speech. Now, every politician in a hurry throws around Q1s and H2s like snuff at a wake, as though the rest of us think of the division of the year in any terms other than Disappointing Summer and Not Christmas Already.

Yesterday, Mr McGrath added his spoke to that unlovely linguistic wheel. Changes will be coming, he told us, on ‘One January’, ‘One April’ and ‘One August’. April Fool’s Day never sounded like less craic.

Of course, those weren’t the only red-letter days in this Budget speech. You might even be forgiven for thinking that the future is so bright you’d have to vote Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

There were those two big funds, after all – the Future Ireland Fund which, Mr McGrath insisted, is ‘not a rainy day fund’, even if it looks and quacks exactly like a rainy day fund. And the Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund, which, we’d suggest, is surely a sunny day fund.

Both of those are long-range measures though, and in keeping with the long finger, there were also a lot of references to one-offs, temporary measures and vaguely keeping promises.

And 2025 got more of a look-in than the year after next usually notches up in these budget speeches. They’ll be looking at vapes then, apparently, which is cold comfort to those of us who hope our children will have grown out of them by then.

SO if the ministers were big on bluster, it was scarcely surprising when Mr Donohoe started waxing philosophical during a speech noticeably longer than that of his senior colleague.

‘Do we spend?’ he asked, in reference to the unwieldy fiscal surplus, or ‘do we save?’

To be honest, we’d have hoped the ministers and their advisers would have figured that out before they got to their feet yesterday, but maybe there’s always room for an ‘if a tree falls in the forest’-type reflection on Budget Day.

There was no standing ovation for Paschal. Maybe it was because he’s such an old hand at this. Maybe it was those time-wasting, rhetorical questions.

Or perhaps it was the delightful moment that went almost unnoticed, when the Minister for Public Expenditure announced an increase in public funding for ‘assisted human reduction’.

Even his leader looked shocked into full consciousness by the announcement of that previously undocumented Fine Gael policy.

Maybe a reduction in humans really is the cure to all the ills that didn’t get much of a look-in yesterday. In the absence of any other seriously big ideas in Budget 2024, sure we might as well put it on the table.