This Budget foments a sense of failure and is feeding the frenzy for change

IF ONE word sums up Budget 2024, then that word is underwhelming. As the two ministers went through their speeches, it felt that while there were lots of morsels, most of them long ago leaked from the Kildare Street colander, the overriding conclusion was that we had been served a tapas Budget. Plenty of small dishes might keep you interested for a while but, ultimately, you still long for a proper piece of meat – and it never came.

There was no imagination, no urgency, no vision, a pretty startling failure in what definitely was the second-last Budget before a general election, and maybe even the last. The headline grabbers – income tax and Universal Social Charge cuts, higher tax credits for renters, mortgage interest relief for thousands of homeowners, more energy subsidies – will not impact on the bottom line of household income until the payslip at the end of January.

And, if there is a rabbit left in the hat for next year, the January

2025 pay packet will be the last one voters will see before the mandatory end of this Government’s five-year term, too late to make any difference when minds already will be made up.

That is why this was the Budget at which you might have expected Ministers McGrath and Donohoe to throw the kitchen sink.

If that sink had landed, it would have been nice to see it in a new house. It is astonishing that the Government seems not to understand that housing is the single biggest issue on the lips of the electorate. The minister responsible, Darragh O’Brien, tweeted that he was particularly pleased to see the increase in renters’ tax credit, and incentives for landlords to stay in the market rather than selling up, but what message did that send to Generation Rent, the people most likely to vote Sinn Féin?

The only good news renters want to see in a Budget is a guarantee that they won’t have to rent at all, and instead will be able to buy affordable homes. Despite the minister touting a ‘historic’ €5billion capital investment in housing next year, that will not be enough. He knows it, and the electorate knows it. Renters still will have few options to buy, and those still living in the family home well into their thirties will see little chance of ever closing the box room door behind them.

Instead, this was billed as a prudent, long-term Budget, one for the future, with particular emphasis on two new funds, one for climate, infrastructure and nature, and the second designed to grow to around €14billion, to meet additional costs in coming years for pensions.

The problem here is that electorates have long memories, not least of the fact that €17.5billion was taken from the national pension fund as a condition of the 2010 Troika bailout. Young voters will hardly care about a rainy-day fund that might be pilfered for other purposes at the first sign of a shower.

This was a critical Budget for the Government to get right, and the ‘one for everyone in the audience’ nature of it ended up feeling unimaginative, and maybe even cynical. There were so many groups to appease, and entitlements were spread out like crumbs. Sometimes, it just is not possible to offer equivalence between young people, their grandparents, and their parents in between, or to renters and landlords alike.

Workers on €55,000 a year might feel that an extra €850 a year net, €71 a month, has already been lost to inflation anyway. The older cohort will look at a €12 weekly pension rise with similar detachment, as they struggle to cope with the cost of feeding themselves.

Having offered €200 subsidies on three energy bills last year, the Government has reduced this to €150, which can only feel like a let-down. Utility companies have announced price cuts, yes, even though everyone knows, from a simple internet search, that Ireland is one of the most expensive countries in Europe for electricity.

So, what was that word again? Oh, yes – underwhelming.

Budget 2024 was a vision not of urgency, but of resignation.

It’s almost as if they don’t get it, that they have been in power too long, and don’t understand the level of anger or anxiety, or comprehend the struggle people are enduring.

There are 900,000 on waiting lists, yet there is less money put into health than previously – and coupled with no major announcement on housing, the Government trio had to watch Sinn Féin’s finance spokesman, Pearse Doherty, shoot their plans like fish in a barrel.

Health, as we know, is the juggernaut that will take years to turn around, and those most affected by its deficiencies tend to be the very young, and older people. The crucial rump of voters in between desperately wanted to hear something hopeful about the issue that really affects them – the provision of affordable housing – but none came.

This will kill the Government in the polls and it will kill it in the election. It foments that sense of failure, that the country is a failing state, and it is feeding the frenzy for change.

Long-term prudence might seem attractive to politicians and mandarins, but this weekend tragically reminded us that global events far beyond our control can scupper even the best-laid plans. The illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine sent economic shockwaves through a world struggling to get back on its feet after a pandemic, and now the attack on Israel by the Palestinian terror group Hamas, and Israel’s predictably brutal retribution, threaten to ignite a wider conflagration in the Middle East, as other actors, in bad faith as well as good, line up behind either side.

Add in continuing mass migration from West Africa, the economic might of China, and instability in the United States as a presidential election year looms,

Housing is the single biggest issue on the lips of the electorate

This will kill the Government in the polls and in the election

with the very real prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House, and the runes are impossible to read. Long-term planning, no matter how often we have lamented its absence, really is beyond our control, so the priority of Government was to deliver concise and effective short-term solutions to the issues that affect us all today, not tomorrow, or next week.

In post-Budget interviews, Government ministers were queuing up to put a gloss on what we heard yesterday, but mostly we saw a fundamental lack of understanding of psychology. If you told people that instead of a €50million lottery jackpot for one winner, 50 people instead would get €1milion each, no one would play at all. It is human nature to seek the big bang, not the damp squib.

Budget 2024 was a like a threecard trick. If you move the cards quickly enough and let people see their shiny surfaces, they might think they know exactly where the ace is, but they would be wrong, because it is usually up the trickster’s sleeve. If both ministers believe that was exactly where to keep it for another year, and then go to the country, they have made a major miscalculation.

It should have been on the table, front and centre – and it wasn’t.