Economics: Assuming that he doesn't depart for Brussels until September, Charlie McCreevy will have spent seven years and three months at the Department of Finance. That won't make him the longest-serving Minister for Finance in the history of the State.
That honour belongs to Seán McEntee, who served for more than 10 years. It won't even entitle him to the silver- or bronze-medal position: they are held respectively by Ernest Blythe and James Ryan, men who have since slipped into the shadows of history.
Still, McCreevy's span will have been comfortably the longest in what might be called "modern Ireland". More to the point, it has been long enough for the man to have made a big impression, to have become something of an icon and to have inspired some powerful myths.
Mr McCreevy has become synonymous with the Celtic Tiger. The more exuberant of his hagiographers all but claim that he single-handedly created the beast. The truth is somewhat different. The Celtic Tiger was already rampant before Mr McCreevy became Minister for Finance. In the four years preceding his first budget, gross domestic product (GDP) growth averaged just under 9 per cent per annum.
Indeed, if the overall performance of the economy were the criterion for assessing a finance minister's performance, Ruairí Quinn would have to be declared a better one. On Mr Quinn's watch, GDP increased by almost 10 per cent per annum and gross national product (GNP) by nearly 9 per cent, compared with the average growth rates of around 7 per cent and 5.5 per cent respectively that Mr McCreevy will have presided over.
Of course, this is a ridiculous basis for comparing the records of different finance ministers. The remarkable growth rates achieved by the economy during the 1990s owed much to policies and institutions put in place over the previous several decades. It was also due in no small measure to favourable external developments over which the Government had no control: a buoyant US economy; the global high-tech boom; declining international interest rates; positive currency movements and so on. That doesn't leave a whole lot for an Irish finance minister to legitimately lay claim to, except his stewardship of the public finances - in particular his decisions about public spending and taxation.
On this score, the myths are especially dissonant from the reality. Mr McCreevy's detractors have painted him as a right-wing ideologue possessed of a Scrooge-like parsimony when it came to public spending. Well, if he was such, he was also remarkably unsuccessful in persuading his cabinet colleagues to adopt the same stance. During his seven-year stewardship, Exchequer capital spending will have risen at the impressive rate of almost 20 per cent annually with the ratio of such spending to GNP increasing from 3.7 per cent to 6.1 per cent, its highest level since the mid-1980s.
Turning to the current side, it is true that public spending will have fallen relative to GNP during the McCreevy years - at 33.5 per cent this year, the ratio of Gross Current Spending to GNP is projected to be about three percentage points lower than in 1997. However, this is more than fully explained by the declining burden of debt service, itself the result of falling interest rates and a reduction in the Government debt-to-GNP ratio.
Excluding this, and focusing on that element of current spending over which the Government can exert direct control, Mr McCreevy will have overseen a rise in current spending relative to GNP: Gross Voted Current Supply Services Expenditure (to give it its full unexpurgated title) is projected at 30.3 per cent of GNP this year, up from 28.5 per cent in 1997. Given the big increase in GNP over the same period, this is remarkable. It results from an annual average increase of more than 11 per cent in the relevant spending aggregate.
How far removed all of this is from the record of a right-wing ideologue is attested to by the fact that, under the "left-wing pinko" Mr Quinn, the same measure of current spending increased by less than 7 per cent per annum (and that in a faster-growing economy), and its share of GNP fell by almost five percentage points (from 33.1 per cent in 1994 to 28.5 per cent in 1997).
It is sometimes suggested that Mr McCreevy's record on the spending front was hugely distorted by the two-year pre-election splurge of 2001 and 2002. But even if this period is excluded, the rate of increase in current spending that occurred on his watch comfortably exceeds that sanctioned during the Quinn years.
But if there is one thing more than any other that marked Mr McCreevy's period in office it was his radical tax cutting, his transformation of the State into a low-tax economy was it not? Well, once again, his reputation somewhat exaggerated. Yes, he boldly cut some tax rates (capital gains tax bring a conspicuous example), and he reduced the burden of income tax by an appreciable margin, but he raised other taxes (VAT and PRSI contributions, for instance).
The net effect is that, over his seven-year tenure, the broadest measure of the tax burden (the ratio of total tax receipts to GNP) is likely to show only a very modest decline.
Allowing that this year's budget projection will be outstripped by about €1.5 billion, total tax revenue in 2004 will amount to just under 35 per cent of GNP, compared with 35.4 per cent in 1997. If this is a low-tax regime, its achievement pre-dated Mr McCreevy. Indeed, Mr Quinn deserves rather more of the credit because under him the ratio of tax receipts to GNP fell by three percentage points.
Mr McCreevy is courageous, opinionated and independent-minded. He is capable of radical and sometimes inspired policy initiatives. For these reasons, he has been a refreshing, reforming and literally outstanding Minister for Finance. But he was not the architect of the Celtic Tiger, he was not a Scrooge and he was not the creator of a low-tax regime. Perhaps the most eloquent testament to his genius is that so many people are convinced that he was all of these things.
Jim O'Leary is currently lecturing in economics at NUI-Maynooth. He can be contacted at jim.oleary@may.ie
