COLUMN: Doherty not dealt the best of hands in her big Budget game

When it comes to the Budget, the name of the Government’s game is expectation. In the boom times it was about to trying to sit on the good news, so that when Charlie McCreevy stood up on Budget day, he had all sorts of goodies to spray around. In the harder times it became a case of leaking out all sorts of harsh measures – some of which never materialised at all – in order to soften the ground for the painful measures that would be pursued.
In the post-austerity era, Budgets are even trickier things. Demoralised by nearly a decade of painful cutbacks and new taxes, people want solace, comfort, restoration… but more than anything they want some relief. That was a message taken too much to heart by the government last year, and it’s one of our own local ministers who will now have to pay the price.
Meath’s own member of the cabinet table Regina Doherty has the biggest spending brief in the land, with an annual budget of around €20bn - and she holds the reins of Social Protection at what ought to be a relatively quiet time, with unemployment continually falling well below expectations.

But Doherty in fact might have been dealt one of the hardest hands of Budget 2017 – and made a few questionable calls in how she has played her cards.
Let’s start with the hand she has been dealt. Doherty wasn’t a full minister this time last year – in that she wasn’t running a Department – and therefore didn’t have a full part in any Budget talks. Budget 2018 will be politically torturous because Budget 2017 was badly handled.
According to the Government’s own figures, this year’s Budget will have €610m to put towards new current spending measures — in other words, €610m to go towards new day-to-day spending like public pay increases, extra Gardaí and nurses, welfare increases, and so on.
Sound good? It might, until you take in the second half of that figure: €470m of that has already been committed elsewhere. Yes: between the new public service pay deal and a few other commitments, most of this year’s money for new measures has already been spent. A major whack of it was, in fact, committed to in the last Budget.
That is not Doherty’s own fault. To a great extent Paschal Donohoe is the architect of his own difficulties this year, having used last year’s Budget to spend most of next year’s extra cash. But it highlights the huge constraints within which ministers will have to operate — and, knowing that would be the case, that’s where we turn to how Doherty has played her hand thus far.
While any final verdict has to wait until next week, when the Budget actually makes it into the public arena, we can take some signposts from some of Doherty’s policy pronouncements thus far. Start in the summer, when the Minister said it was children and lone parents who are most at risk of poverty, and that those would therefore be the ones she would hope to defend and reward with whatever Budget she had. That comment was laudable, and marked a brave policy twist from the Minister, marking out a hierarchy of welfare recipients, and specifically targeting some for help, instead of spreading the gains so thinly across the board that nobody felt a benefit.
But the week after, word came in the Sunday Independent, citing sources close to the minister, that the State pension also required an increase. That, too, is fair enough – in fact, the Programme for Government requires it – but the sources went a step further. “We are not giving them less than a fiver,” the source said. “If we are not giving a fiver we are not giving anything. We can't do this miserable business of giving €2.50 or €3.”
That presents an issue. The last Budget’s increase of €5 a week in the State pension (which only kicked in April, in order to save money) will cost the State roughly €125m before the end of this year. Repeating the same increase this time around would cost the same, if not slightly more.
What’s more, speaking to the Irish National Organisation for the Unemployed last week, the minister remarked she couldn’t live on a weekly income of €198. Whatever the merits of that comment, it should be stated that in fact the weekly assistance for the unemployed is not €198, but €193. Less for those under 26. Is that a hint that the Dole is getting increased too?
When there’s only €140m of new cash to go around for the entire public service – including education and health – it’s clear that Regina simply won’t have enough cash to tick all the boxes she (and we) would like. But unless she can find some extra bundles of cash are found down the back of her Store Street sofa, the minister might find herself trying to explain the shortcomings, and not the victories.

This column first appeared in the Meath Chronicle last Tuesday. Don't miss Gavan's column every week only in the paper!