Gavan Reilly: Early Budget bidding war could see a costly end for the Coalition
A lot of the political copy filed at the weekend was about the apparent budget wars already beginning – and whether this amounted to usurping the formal process.
The way this has all worked out is rather curious. Remember last year, when there was holy war over how three Fine Gael junior ministers demanded tax cuts in an op-ed in the Irish Independent? That piece was published on the May of the Bank Holiday weekend and, while it merely amounted to Fine Gael ministers restating Fine Gael aspirations, was considered by others in government to be an untimely starting shot in the negotiations. Remember, too: one of the authors was Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, who was a junior minister at the Department of Finance at the time – meaning open warfare with her superior, Michael McGrath.
The way Fianna Fáil responded at the time, you’d swear there had been insults exchanged over the memories of dead grandparents. Yet fast-forward twelve months and, in the middle of Ard Fheis/Conference/Convention season, there’s already open bidding about the amount to be added to the pension and possible increases to child benefit.
Eamon Ryan was gamely sticking to the 2023 playbook, saying that any budget kite-flying now would be rejected by the public as “easy false promises” (though announcing, only a few hours later, that Ireland would deliver 40,000 new homes this year – which is about 20 per cent higher than the ‘official’ target of 33,450).
Curiously, Micheál Martin and Simon Harris both had exactly the same quip in reply: Eamon Ryan is one to talk given the scale of spending requests he puts out. Fair enough.
The problem with the timing this year is that it’s not just budgetary: there’s obviously an electoral edge to it, and make it double – and it highlights the difficulty facing the coalition in the run-in to the ballot box.
Every coalition government has an end-of-term difficulty where the parties simultaneously have to try and keep the show on the road, yet also need to distinguish themselves from each other – an impossible task as it means displaying unity and difference at precisely the same time.
As we head into a mammoth round of elections, with every single public office holder in Ireland up for replacement in the next 18 months, those difficulties will compound. For example: in 2019 Fine Gael ran on a ticket of cutting 15% from local property taxes where possible; Fianna Fáil were non-specific and left it up to each council; the Greens, while wanting the tax overhauled, preferred to keep the income so as to empower each council.
Will they have the same spread of views this year? And if they do, how do the parties then pull together for a united front on a Budget when each of them has spent so many months previously making what sound like election pledges, but are implicitly a direct claim on the limited money the State has to offer?
Between the early onset bidding wars, and the ticking clock on the Dáil as the to-do list of legislation gets ever longer, one can genuinely wonder how much of a coherent agenda can be progressed in the next ten months. Game on.