Steve McQueen won this year's Turner Prize for art with a reworked film about a man whose house fell on top of him while he kept standing. Charlie McCreevy is certainly no McQueen, but the pack of cards he dealt the family in last week's Budget wrecked his Government's credibility on family values with much the same explosiveness as Buster Keaton's original silent movie.
Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, McCreevy clicked his heels in an attempt to persuade us all he does believe "there's no place like home." Instead, he has undermined the very concept. His child-blind Budget ignores over a dozen reports on children and the family, introduces a potentially destructive value judgment about what makes a good family, and administers a large slap in the face to the social and community pillar on whose goodwill his Government must rely in the partnership negotiations.
Children all over the State posting their Santa letters this week may ponder the choices he offers them. A mammy or a Pokemon? A daddy or a Baby Born?
Children whose parents work unpaid within the home will be positively disadvantaged, unless their breadwinner is rich. The things we do for love no longer count. Everyone is uncomfortable about McCreevy's implicit message that paid work sets you free, and that everything else comes second to that imperative. For now, the issue is the family. Soon, such an attitude could have devastating consequences for human dignity and all areas of social exclusion.
It didn't have to be this way. Expert reports recommended a portfolio approach to childcare, child welfare and family taxation. All are ignored - except the needs of IBEC. There's no parental wage or extra benefits for those who care for children under four, no publicly-accountable childcare system, no mandatory practices to foster family-friendly workplaces or new strategies on caring for children.
This Velcro Budget simply sticks together overly superficial approaches to labour supply and demand. Women and men who work unpaid in the home are offered a negative incentive to work in paid employment, implying that they must then pay worse-off women and men to care for their children. Such former carers come cheaper than does immigrant labour, which entails extra costs for housing, health and education.
No measures are introduced to attract more childcare workers into the industry, already seriously under-staffed, or to help providers and parents pay the increased salary costs such workers will require. An £8 monthly child benefit will do nothing to address child poverty or childcare costs, and will leave carers with the option of buying one bag of disposable nappies, or fewer than a dozen pairs of shoelaces, each month.
Parents in paid employment will welcome the new system of individualised taxation, which redresses inequities for two-income families although doing so outside the scope of the PAYE allowance, but not the exclusion of those who work unpaid at home. Potential increases in after-tax income for dual-earner families may contribute to the cost of only one month's crΦche fees.
This new "individualisation" is skin-deep only. It is a clever term for a clumsy policy. Despite parents being constitutionally recognised as the primary educators of the child, choice about their child's upbringing will in fact become more restricted. No tax allowances or adequate benefits will enable them to choose the best facility available for their child. If they live outside a major urban centre, they will have major trouble finding any childcare at all.
Women who wonder about the constitutionality of the measures may note that women's work in the home was not recognised in 1937. The relevant provisions give her a special position for her "life" there, not for her labour. Whatever historical excuses may be pleaded in defence of de Valera, no such arguments justify McCreevy's stance.
We're advised that this measure brings us into line with mainland Europe. It does not. Elsewhere in Europe, except in Spain and Portugal, publicly available and publicly subsidised childcare systems form a bulwark against the fracturing of tax and welfare that McCreevy's Budget represents. The new capital allowances carry no requirement that the carers continue to provide the service for a prescribed length of time. This leaves the allowance open to abuse.
One simple, discreet application for change of use to the planning authorities, and you could win a tax bonanza for a range of other utilities.
We're advised, too, that single-income families will be better off in terms of the total resources available to them. Let us spell out what this means. Either you must pay someone to do your cleaning, your washing, your childcare and your home-making, or you should marry someone willing to do the job for free. The question begged by this contorted logic is direct. If the things we do for love don't count, then why bother to love at all?
What McCreevy's Budget heralds is the entry to the Irish labour market of mid-Atlantic Man. Much as he and Bertie Ahern may profess an admiration for the democratic politics of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Bill Clinton, their combined approach to economics mirrors more the conservatism pioneered by Ronald Reagan and now championed by Republican candidate George Bush jnr.
This politics goes against the trend of preferred spending choices listed by in this newspaper's recent survey of what people's social priorities actually are. In the face of what appears to be an ever-more cynical society, people showed that they were overwhelmingly willing to forgo personal benefit when they were assured that minority and excluded groups would benefit. The Government may have forgotten that children come first, but citizens demonstrably have not.
There is now no reason to have children. Dual-income families will be better off if they don't. Just as a 2000-registered car will become the status symbol of the millennium, so having a trophy partner who works in the home will now stand as a sign of upward mobility, as it does in the US. It cannot stand for anything else. Why? Under McCreevy's Budget, people will look either lazy or foolish instead.
Medb Ruane can be contacted at mruane@irish-times.ie