The Budget is one of the great set-pieces of the Irish political calendar, and the last budget before a general election always comes with an additional charge of electricity. But when Minister for Finance Jack Chambers and Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe delivered their speeches to a packed Dáil on Tuesday, hardly anything they said would have come as a surprise to readers of The Irish Times due to our politics team’s comprehensive predictions over the preceding days.
Even though the scale of the tax cuts, spending increases and special payments was known in advance, the overall picture of a Government awash with cash and determined to win the affection of voters with some of it will remain the abiding impression of this week’s events. As the week unfolded, and the Opposition scrambled to find a line of attack, the unlikely subject of a proposal to spend €9 million on phone pouches for schools became the centre of heated debate.
More serious criticism came from the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (IFAC), which warned the Budget “repeats Ireland’s past mistakes of pumping billions into the economy when it is at full employment”.
But, Pat Leahy noted in his Wednesday postmortem, “as the politicians never, ever tire of pointing out, the economists don’t have to stand for election. The reality is that this Government is months – weeks, maybe – away from an election and there is not just a demand from TDs and Ministers for spreading around some of the spare cash, there is a demand from voters for it as well.”
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Attention turned swiftly to the subject of that election and when it might be called. On Thursday Harry McGee reported that legislation was being fast-tracked to clear the way for a November date. Our reporters also took a straw poll of 30 TDs and Senators, the vast majority of whom are now girding their loins for a November contest. However, as one Minister pointed out, the leaders of the three Government parties have yet to meet to discuss the issue. The expectation now is that the conversation will take place when the Taoiseach returns from his trip to Washington next week. One wonders whether while he’s there he might ask Joe Biden about the assertion in Boris Johnson’s new memoir, as reported by London Correspondent Mark Paul, that the US president confessed to the then British prime minister that his family origins were “not really Irish” at all. Probably not.
By Friday, Jack Horgan-Jones was back on the case, reporting new details of the intense, last-minute negotiations within Government leading up to the final agreement on the details of the Budget. Interestingly, both Chambers and Donohoe had privately echoed some of the concerns that would be raised by IFAC a couple of days later. Jack reports that Donohoe had warned some proposed measures “could be seen as reminiscent of boom-era decisions”. However, Green Party leader Roderic O’Gorman held firm and finally got what he wanted – a new “baby boost” payment for new parents. This in-depth reporting of how the negotiations unfolded, and the important role of custard creams, is well worth reading.
Meanwhile, columnist Diarmaid Ferriter was placing the role of the Budget in an historical overview stretching back to the bleak 1950s. “It is the boom and bust rather than the neutral budgets that are remembered,” he wrote. “The inextricable link with the electoral cycle has been a constant, as has a problem identified as far back as 1941 by writer Seán O’Faoláin when decrying the absence of long-term vision. Irish politics, he concluded, was hobbled by ‘conflict between the definite principles of past achievement and the undefined principles of present ambition’.”
Also taking a historical view, albeit a shorter one, his fellow columnist Stephen Collins urged the Taoiseach not to repeat the mistake made by his predecessor. “At one level there is an uncanny resemblance between October 2024 and October 2019,” he wrote. “Five years ago, Fine Gael was also riding high on 29 per cent of the vote and party head Leo Varadkar was easily the most popular leader. Three months later, the party crashed to third place in terms of the popular vote after a disastrous campaign in January and February of 2020.”
But the decision is not Harris’s alone to make. By the weekend Pat was suggesting that relations between the three Government parties were becoming strained. He described a “scratchiness between the parties that is scratchiest at the very top” and offered a different perspective on the increasingly fevered speculation over election timing.
“For months now, I have been of the view that a November election is likely because it is blindingly obvious that it is in the Government’s own interests for that to happen,” he wrote. “But it is forcefully put to me from within Government that this is the wrong way to look at it. There is no such thing as the Government’s political interests when it comes to an election, I am told. There is only the interests of the separate parties. They may or may not align.”
One way or another, we will all know soon enough. Meanwhile, Cliff Taylor returned to the budget itself and its most-asked question: what does it mean for me? If you’re part of a five-member, dual-income family earning more than €70,000 a year, Cliff awards you the winner’s medal this year. But he ends on a cautionary note: “Come next year’s budget, households will again be looking for cash support. If the money is there, politicians will find it impossible to say ‘no’.”
There’s plenty more on irishtimes.com this weekend. In Kyiv, Daniel McLaughlin has assembled a moving portrait of Robert Deegan, the Kildare man who was killed on the battlefield last month while fighting with Ukrainian special forces. It’s a story told through the testimony of Ukrainians who fought alongside – and greatly admired – the former Army Ranger.
We introduced a weekly essay slot earlier this year, and it’s one of my favourite Saturday features. This week it belongs to the Berlin-based novelist Naoise Dolan, who writes about what learning to play the piano taught her.
Elsewhere, I’d recommend Seanín Graham’s interview with the new SDLP leader Claire Hanna and Róisín Ingle’s conversation with Anna Geary.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
Editor
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