Brendan Howlin: It is ludicrous to suggest public service salaries cannot be restored

Over the last 100 years, we have made enormous social progress. Infant mortality rates have improved exponentially, literacy and numeracy levels and school completion rates have gone through the roof, life expectancy is up, and the likelihood of spending your life in abject, consistent poverty has dropped enormously.

This period of rising living standards has been commensurate with a period of political stability too. Out of the ashes of the second World War, Europe has experienced seventy years of unparalleled prosperity.

That was at least the case until 2008 when we experienced the onset of a recession that brought this state to the brink of viability.

I said many times over the last five years that the recovery of the Irish economy and Irish society from these travails may be as historically noteworthy as the recession itself. But at this distance such perspective may be an ask too far. There remain many too issues to put right.

Odd as it may sound, one of those most affected by the recession is the economics profession. Tarred by a once in three generation downturn it didn’t predict, it is determined not to be caught on the hop again. The result is economic analysis that is extraordinarily conservative, indeed almost fatalistic.

Thankfully the economic fundamentals are telling a different story. Crucially wages are growing again, most significantly in the United States, and our own economy is growing again.

There is a connection here, in my view, between this manifestation of mainstream economic thinking, and the level of dissatisfaction being expressed globally at ‘elites’ or ‘the establishment’.

It seems clear to me that the stability we have enjoyed over the last 70 years assumes a correlation between that stability, economic growth, and resultant improvements in living standards for our people. The alternative is the politics of doom there are many who seek to take advantage of same.

It is ludicrous to suggest that public service salaries won’t be restored. Use the word restoration, or don’t. But in time, pay will certainly return to 2008 levels and indeed move beyond such levels. To deny this is to suggest that living standards of public sector workers should be expected to continue to fall for the years ahead.

This conservative hold on our economic debate manifested itself during the election also. The programmes put forward by various parties sought to live within a set of fiscal rules designed better to prevent recession than deal with its outbreak. Yes the public were told frequently that politicians had reentered a realm of expensive and irresponsible programmes and promises.

Likewise, during the recent debate on the budget we were told that the bad old days were returning and that spending was out of control. The opposite is the case. Announced spending shows an increase of just over 8 per cent in three years, substantially below trend growth. This is in stark contrast to the madness of Fianna Fail budgets during the 2000s, when spending increases were running at three times that level.

In preparing for the Budget, we all knew 2017 was going to be difficult, perhaps 2018 also. But thereafter there is no need for a language of public-private or intergenerational resource wars.

I say all this with a track record. I am not a deficit denier. Our state endured an existential crisis. I did not deny the need to repair our public finances in 2011 and played my part in recovering the economy.

I am not someone who regards fiscal or economic realities as elite dictats to be ignored. I believe that a prosperous society must, in the long term, maintain sustainable rates of growth and translate those into sustainable and sustained improvements to living standards for our people.

But nor am I an advocate of the schools of economic that argue that the beatings should continue until morale improves.

We’ve made progress over the last hundred years but progress must never stop: the elimination of child poverty; the creation of a meaningful level of equality throughout society; the further advancing of individual freedoms; the protection and development of our natural and built environments; and the restoration of the state as a force for meaningful good though the provision of high quality, efficient and effective public services - all of these are reasonable ambitions we should set, and we should mean to realise them.

Our economy is now larger than it was in 2008, even allowing for the recent controversy around the calculation of GDP in Ireland. Our tax take has been broadened, with increased revenues from corporation tax, new local property taxes funding a greater proportion of the expenditure of our local authorities, and so on. But a stronger economy is not an end in and of itself. Our economy exists to serve our social needs.

To maintain democratic legitimacy for our state, it is important that we are more ambitious for the next hundred years than we were for much of the last hundred.

Brendan Howlin is the leader of the Labour Party