Taoiseach Varadkar will fall on his own sword by ignoring lessons of history
The Taoiseach cannot emulate his Tory heroes and look to fund tax cuts by cutting services, writes Willie O’Dea
IF government was only about photo-ops and designer socks then anyone with a personal trainer and spin doctor could do it. But it isn’t. Government is about deciding complex issues where the arguments for and against are finely balanced and the best outcome is still going to disappoint as many people as it pleases.
These are the decisions that keep you awake at night. Yes, the plush office, extra staff and chauffeur-driven ministerial car can make the job quite comfortable, but the realisation that the choices you make can detrimentally affect the real lives of real people is the modern-day equivalent of the guy at the back of the chariot whispering “remember thou art mortal” in the ear of a great roman general or tribune about to receive their great tribute.
Taking these tough decisions tests more than your political mettle, it also challenges your core beliefs. This new Taoiseach, and his not-quite-so-new Government, will be faced with a tough decision over the coming weeks, and the early indications suggest that he will make the wrong call based on a right-wing outlook which does not accord with the public mood.
That decision is how to use the small, and it may turn out to be very small, amount of money the Government will have left within its “fiscal space” after all the existing spending commitments and costs of the public sector pay deal are met.
On last Thursday’s RTE Prime Time, the Taoiseach declined to exclude the possibility of funding tax cuts by cutting some expenditure and/or raising indirect taxes. As was reported in this paper last week, no matter how he juggles the figures, there is no way I can back any plan that denies increases for carers, people with disabilities or pensioners. The increases given to them over recent years have not kept pace with the increasing cost of living and that means they have, in real terms, been losing out.
Varadkar cannot emulate his Tory heroes and heroines and look to fund tax cuts by cutting already under-funded supports and services or by raising indirect taxes, a route that most adversely hurts the least well off, a growing section in our society, as the recent Unicef Innocenti Report showed.
One in five children in Ireland is now growing up in a jobless household, it is one of the highest rates in the developed world. This simply cannot be allowed to continue. The internal criticisms of the senior, junior and super junior ministerial appointments highlighted the difficulties the new Taoiseach is having in delivering on all the promises made to TDs to beat Minister Simon Coveney within the parliamentary party. Varadkar should not attempt to play up to these disgruntled TDs and senators by favouring a further shift to the right.
The right may well be in the majority inside the Fine Gael party rooms, but they are not in a majority in the Dail. Indeed, they are not even in a majority among his own party activists.
As a Social Protection Minister, Varadkar saw himself as sort of a game keeper, constantly trying to catch people out, when in fact his role was to support people who need the State’s assistance. His bogus welfare cheats campaign neatly summed up that approach, though the Government had to climbdown on it this week.
The fear is that he plans to take the approach he adopted in Social Protection and roll it across the entirety of Government. Pitting sections of our society against each other is a sad echoing of Thatcher and Tebbit. The Taoiseach is entitled to his centre-right dogmas and beliefs. I am sure from my time as his opposite number that they are sincerely and deeply held, but until he obtains his own mandate with a government with its own secure majority, he has neither the authority nor the capacity to impose them on anyone.
Like those ancient Roman tribunes, he would do well to heed the warnings now and not wait for the whispers to turn to screams.