Noonan and Howlin’s budget dilemma

Social media is not the real world. It is a sort of parallel universe and generalising from Twitter and Facebook to the tangible world is fraught with danger. But what are we to make of traffic on The Irish Times business site yesterday?

Readers of a piece about a complimentary editorial on Ireland in the Financial Times outstripped by a country mile the readers of articles on the Fiscal Advisory Council's warning to the Government not to lose the budgetary plot.

It goes a bit beyond preferring good news to bad news. It speaks to a need to believe that the economy has turned the corner and that some of the grinding austerity of the recent past can be reversed.

This in turn encapsulates the dilemma Michael Noonan and Brendan Howlin face as they frame next year's budget. How can you tell the electorate that the economy is healing but you must cut spending once again because the future is so uncertain?

In many ways, their decisions will come to define their time in office more than their adroit management of the bailout programme. They have received advice – albeit one suspects unsolicited – from the council setting out the medium- to long- term case for further retrenchment. The national debt must be tackled now so that it is less of burden in the future, it argues.

Nobody knows whether the council is right, but one thing is certain and it is that neither man is likely to still be in office when the consequences of not following its advice manifests. However, history is likely to judge them harshly if the council is right and they ignored its advice.

It is also certain that both men – and their Cabinet colleagues – will be around for the next election when the voters will judge them. Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is that they don’t try and please the electorate to much.