OPINION:There's a very simple test of what will be Brian Lenihan's first budget today, writes Fintan O'Toole
THE ONE good thing about a decade of misgovernment is that it is now possible to do two apparently contradictory things at the same time. It may seem like wishful thinking to suggest that the State can both spend less money and get better public services. But there are areas in which this is demonstrably true.
The test of today's Budget is not, therefore, whether it cuts spending, but how it does so. Any fool can slash and burn. What we desperately need is an intelligent reorientation of the use of public resources.
There's one simple way to know by the end of today whether the Government has been shocked into some real thinking, or is simply running around in a panic. What does the Budget do about early childhood care? As well as being a hugely important issue, this is also a classic test case in which we can spend less and get a far better outcome. It's an area of public policy in which an almighty mess has been created by sheer political indolence. And it's therefore one in which we can achieve both significant improvements and substantial savings by the application of a missing ingredient - leadership.
The story here is perhaps the single biggest indictment of the fecklessness of recent governments. While Fianna Fáil and the PDs squandered public money and political capital on pet projects, they ignored a proposal that would have made a real, long-term difference to both the quality of life and social justice in Ireland. That project didn't come from left field. The National Economic and Social Forum (NESF), which includes all the social partners, members of the Oireachtas, Government departments and local government agencies, came up with a set of proposals to tackle our abysmal level of childcare provision.
The centrepiece of the strategy was the establishment of a universal system of pre-school education, 3½ hours a day, five days a week, funded by the State.
The impact of such a system would be huge. It would help to resolve a pressing economic and social problem, and would disproportionately help the most vulnerable children, allowing for the early intervention that is much cheaper and much more effective than later attempts to pick up the pieces.
What happened? Absolutely nothing. There was no response at all from the Government. No argument about why this might not be a good idea, just a shrug of the shoulders. The project was simply too much trouble. But the immediate problem demanded some kind of response. So the Government opted for an appallingly lazy, inefficient and ultimately ineffective "solution" - an early childcare supplement of €1,100 payable to parents. This is of limited value to those parents (childcare costs on average €10,000 a year). But, and here's the really extraordinary part - it costs three times as much as the NESF's proposals. Instead of getting a universal pre-school system for €136 million a year, we're spending €406 million on a private system that doesn't work.
So, there's a very simple test of Brian Lenihan's first budget. If it contains a commitment to scrap the early childcare supplement and to create a universal pre-school system, we have intelligent government. We can therefore also expect to see similar approaches in other areas.
Instead of cutting back on home care packages for the elderly and infirm, for example, we'll see a substantial increase in funding for them. Home care packages save money by keeping people out of more expensive hospital beds, and improve the quality of life of vulnerable citizens. Instead of continuing to spend a fortune warehousing our primary schoolchildren in rented prefabs (at a cost of €40 million this year), we'll build schools. Instead of the near €2 billion spent since 2000 on rent supplement to keep low-income families in generally substandard accommodation, we'll spend money on public housing.
None of this is to suggest that there's a magic formula whereby all areas of spending can be curtailed, while improving services. But it does mean the issue of controlling public finances is not some abstract mathematical equation. How money is spent matters almost as much as how much of it we have.
A decade of full Government coffers didn't automatically translate into decent public services, and mindless cutbacks won't automatically translate into fiscal stability. What we need is a sense of values and an understanding that we are facing not "temporary adjustments" but a major economic shift. The values should determine priorities and allow for the ending of stupid expenditure like so-called "decentralisation" and tax breaks for private hospitals.
The awareness that we're facing long-term change should caution against making cutbacks this year that will cost us more money in two or 10 years' time.
Footnote: It is perhaps a mark of the decrepit state of Irish journalism that this column is now 20 years old. I'd like to thank readers for their persistence over the years, and for the reactions of revulsion and encouragement that have reminded me that there's someone out there.