Apart from the grossly politicised decentralisation proposals which undermine the Government's own National Spatial Strategy, the Budget contained little of moment,writes Garret FitzGerald.
However, the run-up to it disclosed further evidence of the growing incoherence of our political system, which has increasingly failed to cope with the competitive stresses and strains of our multi-seat electoral system, an incoherence that has recently spread to the Cabinet system itself.
Of course, within the two larger parties, both of which have the ambition to win more than one seat in most constituencies, it was always inevitable that our multi-seat system would generate tensions between competing candidates of the same political persuasion.
But in the past, under the strong leadership, first of de Valera, and then of Lemass, who until 1965 was backed in government by men such as Seán McEntee, Jim Ryan, and Frank Aiken, Fianna Fáil was a highly disciplined party, which kept these tensions well under control.
Between the 1930s and the 1970s Fine Gael was less successful in this respect, because with the decline in its support during and after the early 1930s it came to elect only one TD in most constituencies, and by 1977 none at all in four of them.
Many local party organisations thus came under the control of TDs who were primarily concerned to protect themselves against competition from strong second candidates, and through the representation of their constituencies on the party's National Executive these TDs were then in a position to discourage the selection of such candidates.
With such a party structure there was often little chance of the emergence of strong local rivals who might win seats for the party.
That changed in 1978 when the Fine Gael ardfheis revolutionised the party organisation in such a way as to place control in the hands of enthusiastic party members, as a result of which Fine Gael increased its Dáil representation by 50 per cent overnight, securing in 1981 either two or three seats in more than half of all constituencies.
However, the cohesion of both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil eventually came to be affected by rivalries at the top. Party discipline suffered, and candidate rivalry got out of control.
Whereas previously constituency campaigns had been financed by the party, with individual candidates spending only small sums on their own incidental expenses during the election, those candidates now began to raise money themselves to finance personal campaigns that were directed as much against their party rivals as against political opponents.
It was this development that opened the way for several powerful Fianna Fáil ministers to use elections to improve their own personal finances, by withholding some of these political contributions from their local and/or national party organisations.
In recent decades there has also been a very worrying deterioration in the cohesion of the government itself. The practice of ministers using their position to divert public resources to their own constituencies was allowed to grow - something that I do not think was permitted to happen in the earlier decades of our State's history.
As a result, what had previously been a natural local pride in seeing one of their constituency TDs in government gradually turned into a justified belief by constituents that only by having "a minister of their own" could local interests be effectively promoted.
Associated with this distortion of the national interest in response to local pressures was a growing preoccupation with achieving balanced geographical representation in cabinet rather than with choosing the most effective team of ministers.
I recall being accused by the media in 1981 of having failed what had come to be seen as this crucial geographical test.
Nevertheless, until recently there survived the concept of joint cabinet responsibility and - albeit to a lesser extent - the tradition of parliamentary party solidarity.
Thus, despite local pressures and rivalries, we had retained an effective system of central government, capable of taking decisions in the general national interest.
The recent evident erosion of the effectiveness of this system of central government must be a matter of serious worry to anyone concerned for the future of our democratic system.
For our Government currently faces a number of key issues involving decisions that will be locally unpopular in some areas. These include both the reform of the health service and the concentration of economic development in and around a small enough number of centres to secure in each of these areas a regional dynamic capable of countering the attractive power of Dublin.
It is a measure of how our standards of humanity have fallen that, in a country with a level of national output that is now up to and indeed running beyond the European average, our Government TDs have come to tolerate complacently the present state of our health services, and to resist urgently necessary reforms.
For many, their two priorities have become the achievement of the lowest level of taxation in Europe, and avoidance of conflict with powerful vested and local interests.
So when, belatedly, a Minister tries to start tackling the scandal of the health service, the parish-pump concerns of some of his colleagues in Government and in the Dáil, together with weak government leadership, threaten to scupper his efforts.
Politics is the most demanding of professions, because those who practise it are perpetually faced with choices between doing what is right and doing what is popular. A politician who always does what is right rather than what is popular is, of course, unlikely to be re-elected, and his or her capacity to do good will be short-lived.
But if a politician always caves in to popular pressure, he or she would be better to take up some other occupation where less harm can be done.
The key to politics is combining these two conflicting objectives judiciously, through leadership that will persuade people to rise above their local and selfish preoccupations in the interests of the whole community.
I do not think that any objective observer would say that we are at present experiencing that kind of leadership.