Failures admitted amid the self-praise

ANALYSIS:THE COALITION'S progress report on its first year in Government was always going to be a tricky assignment.

For one, Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s over-blown “chapel gate” rhetoric before and after the general election had set the bar very high with respect to ministerial standards and created expectations that were neither realistic nor achievable.

He promised to sack Ministers who were underperforming and also told Ryan Tubridy on RTÉ’s Late Late Show that he was preparing a “report card” on each Minister. He never indicated that these processes would be public but then he never said they would not be either.

Neither eventuality was going to happen. How could he sack a Labour Minister without prompting a deal-breaking rift? Nor was an individual Minister ever going to be chastised publicly. Indeed, in the past few days Government aides have been stressing the document would not be prepared on a department-by-department basis.

Therefore, there would not be sufficient basis to make individual evaluation of any of the Ministers.

What was produced yesterday had many of the hallmarks of the documents the Fianna Fáil-PD coalition produced when they were in office.

The most notorious was the one produced in 2003, on the first anniversary of the second coalition. It listed all the goals set out in the programme for government and the progress on each. It was a long and uncritical exercise in self-congratulation, a snow-job in other words.

Yesterday’s offering followed the form of those annual reports. But there was more than a smidgen of criticism and admission of failure amid the (admittedly long) paean of self-praise. Some 167 promises from the programme for government were listed and in about 10 or 12 it was accepted there had been failure or delay or disappointment.

While the language is euphemistic, there is acceptance that among the promises to have bitten the dust are: the ban on upward-only rent reviews, the provision of a new campus for the Dublin Institute of Technology in Grangegorman, VAT exemption for certain exporters, and the Thornton Hall and Kilworth prisons. The biggest failure of all, burden-sharing for senior bank bondholders and a renegotiation of the interest rate on the EU-IMF programme, is also grappled with but in a slightly roundabout way. It is included in a kind of “page of shame”, entitled Commitments Under Review.

But the phraseology is delicate: “Government discussions with the troika resulted in a change in policy approach.” That refers to the change of tack last autumn when attention turned to the Anglo promissory notes when it became clear the Government was getting nowhere with interest rates.

Elsewhere, the Coalition claims credit for the lowering of the bailout interest rate, which saved €8 billion, which emerged as part of a Europe-wide deal when Greece got a second bailout package. It also points to its early (and by consensus, successful) recapitalisation of the banks, achieved for less than half of the €35 billion originally estimated.

Last Friday, The Irish Times did a similar exercise which showed that the Government had acted on many of its pledges in its first year and ticked off many (if not all) of the promised initiatives during its first year of Government.

Both Kenny and Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore struck sober tones in their contributions yesterday. Kenny said he was not looking for any gold stars nor claiming that a corner had been turned. Gilmore said the Government was not going to make exaggerated claims.

And on that basis, their claim that the Coalition has made a “solid start” in its first year of Government is probably justified. However, despite the “tús maith” both are keenly aware that there is far more than “leath na hoibre” yet to do.