Charlie McCreevy, as he keeps reminding us, is a man of his word. He has done what Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats said they would do during the 1997 election. It's payback time and that's it.
So McCreevy cuts tax rates, even when many on the top rate said it wasn't necessary; it would have been fairer if he didn't. But Fianna Fail and the PDs had not promised a fairer society. And, true to their word, McCreevy didn't try to deliver.
It cost the Exchequer £163 million to cut the top rate from 44 to 42 per cent. The Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI) estimates that for £15 million less social assistance payments could have been raised by £14 a week, instead of the £8 rise which did little more than make up for inflation.
Last year the row of the season was about individualisation. Some said it was anti-family, others that it was unfair to couples living on a single income. McCreevy's allies blamed presentation: he hadn't prepared the public for change or made himself clear when he announced it.
But there was a much more serious fault in last year's budget: as commentators in the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) and CORI have pointed out, it made ours a more unequal society.
Journalists, with a few decent exceptions, ignored the story. As the metaphormixers would have it, they had sexier fish to fry. And to say that most of the unions tread warily on issues other than wages and taxes would be to understate their caution. They let the hare sit.
Now, when we get over the hysteria and the baby talk - bonanzas, £4 billion give-aways and Santa Claus - we'll find that, in spite of the riches and the advice at its disposal, this year's Budget was not much better, it was much the same. Loads of money and no vision.
This is not to deny its achievements. It arms the Government with potential electoral appeal; defuses the dangers of an explosive breakdown in the PPF; and meets many of the demands of the lumpen middle classes.
It satisfies a majority of trade unionists on whose support the PPF depends, but even more of those who - Motorola notwithstanding - think they'll never need a union about the place.
But just look at the figures. Over the last four budgets a couple on two salaries amounting to £17,000 will have gained £2,192; a couple on £34,000 almost £7,650; a couple on £60,000 more than £9,2400, and a couple on £100,000 some £11,644.
So the gains of the highest-paid are five times greater than those of the lowest, the couple whose combined earnings are close to the average industrial wage. And the gap between long-term unemployed and the relatively well-off is even more striking and more shameful.
As CORI puts it: "During this Government's period in office a long-term unemployed couple are £32 a week better off while a couple with two incomes totalling £40,000 are £210 better off. This distribution of resources is neither fair nor just."
Last year the issue given most media attention was individualisation. This year, it's what the Budget tells us about the Government's electoral intentions and strategy. The Government's leading trio - Bertie Ahern, Mary Harney and Charlie McCreevy - has long been recognised as a formidable combination: two hard chaws and a cute hoor. The hard chaws bristle with ideology and shape the Budget; the cute hoor has the electorate in his sights.
Ahern has a reputation as someone who would sign books of blank cheques the height of a filing cabinet and never ask how much, to whom or what for, even if the co-signatory was Charles Haughey, the most devious and dangerous of them all. But how good is Ahern's judgment? And how will his electoral chances be affected by political judgments made when it's payback time at the tribunals?
Look down the list of appointments made when he entered office in 1997 and ask yourself, not how the opposition or Fianna Fail's critics in the media judged them, but how they turned out. He made John Ellis chairman of the agricultural committee, one of the most important committees in the Dail. And Ellis, who had a long-running dispute with farmers when the family firm couldn't pay, had to resign when his own cosy arrangements with the banks came to light.
He sent Denis Foley to the Public Accounts Committee where he became one of the leading investigators of the DIRT scandal. Until he discovered that, in spite of his hopes and prayers, he was a well-heeled Ansbacher account-holder himself.
Ahern's sense of humour is much admired by his friends. They must have been rolling in the aisles when he packed Liam Lawlor off to the ethics committee. Lawlor, no longer on the committee or in the Fianna Fil parliamentary party, will soon be making a reluctant appearance at the Flood tribunal. The best laugh of this week was the case made for Ned O'Keeffe by, of all people, that veteran of the po-faced defence, Michael Woods, and other members of the agricultural lobby. O'Keeffe is Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture and Food which issues licences for the use of meat-and-bonemeal to a small, privileged body of farmers. O'Keeffe spoke for the Government on the issue in the Dail and on Rodney Rice's After Dark.
On radio, he boasted that the Government was so concerned to maintain public confidence in Irish meat it had put farmers in jail, behind bars for offences: "We are prepared never to accept any misunderstanding or any mischief by farmers. . ."
Neither on radio nor in the Dail did O'Keeffe admit his own interest in one of the 17 farms licensed to use meat-and-bonemeal or in a privately run mill which makes it. But, as someone said of him during the week, he's a Fianna Fail man to his fingertips.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie