Wednesday's Budget speech has been castigated for all sorts of reasons but most of all for being dull and boring. One financial analyst described it as a Budget that was easy to deliver but hard to write about. Maybe, there lies the rub.
Our sense of anticipation about budget speeches owes a lot to our perception that what the Minister announces on Budget day has the capacity to greatly influence the course of economic activity - a perception that is well wide of the mark. To the extent that budgets count, it is what happens before budget day that matters most, and by a very wide margin.
Consider the following. A fortnight before this week's Budget speech, in the Book of Estimates, the Government had published plans to spend €37.8 billion net on current and capital items next year. The net effect of the measures announced on Wednesday was to raise this total to €38.3 billion. Almost 99 per cent of planned expenditure for 2004 was known before Budget day.
By the same token, measures unveiled in the Budget speech added just 1.3 per cent net to the planned tax take for 2004.
The increment of information about budgetary policy presented in the Budget speech, therefore, was very small. This is usually the case.
Accordingly, our attention in analysing budgetary policy should be focused mainly on what is known before the Minister does his stand-up routine in the Dáil.
Our attention should be focused on spending programmes: whether they are achieving their objectives; whether those objectives are still worth pursuing; whether programmes are being run efficiently, and so on.
Unfortunately, we are a long way short of having the kind of information required to meaningfully answer these questions across a wide range of programmes.
I can't help feeling that this reflects an aversion on the part of Government and public servants to informed public debate about policy issues. I suspect that, for many members of the policy-making establishment, it is preferable that analysis of the Budget be directed towards what are essentially marginal issues - such as the handful of measures announced on Budget day (or obscure issues such as the "stance" of fiscal policy) - than fundamental questions relating to the effectiveness and efficiency of specific spending programmes.
Having said all that, the Budget speech is not necessarily unimportant. It is, at the very least, an opportunity to communicate fresh ideas. In the past, it has frequently been used to announce radical departures in tax policy. It has sometimes been used to unveil important reforms in the way the public service operates or changes in the budgetary process.
While Wednesday's offering did outline a couple of welcome and interesting policy changes (the new "envelopes" for capital spending and the new rules for public sector pensions, for example), it was exceptionally bland and unadventurous by Mr McCreevy's standards. Remember, this is the man who initiated "individualisation" and restructuring of PRSI contributions, two programmes of reform that have since been driven into the sand.
Some people are now wondering whether this signifies that Charlie McCreevy has lost his bottle? I think it's more likely that, on the occasion of his seventh budget, he has succumbed to pleasure at what he has achieved (shades of the Book of Genesis and the story of Creation here).
This would chime with his increasingly self-congratulatory tone and his declaration that the main strategic policy objective now is to consolidate the gains of the past, rather than strike out to accomplish more. A case perhaps of a lot done, nothing left to do.
If this is how the man feels, maybe he's just doing a lap of honour at this stage before moving on to a new portfolio next year (of which more anon).
The most eloquent testimony to how thin on content and new thinking the Budget speech was, came in the form of the decentralisation proposals. One struggled to understand why this stuff (especially the detail on numbers employed and locations) featured at all, except as a kind of fig-leaf or a distraction.
Predictably it has generated an amount of attention way out of proportion to its significance.
It has also attracted some criticism that misses the point. For example, the fact that almost 80 per cent of the jobs to be decentralised are to be relocated in towns that are neither "hubs" nor "gateways" in the National Spatial Strategy (NSS), has been indicted on the grounds of inconsistency.
How could people think such a thought? Is it not obvious that the selection of towns, villages and hamlets to play host to decentralised government offices was based on a set of criteria that was entirely complementary to the NSS.
In other words, those locations designated as NSS gateways or hubs were the least likely to benefit from decentralisation. It's called regional balance or "benefits for all". Indeed, the wonder is that any of the decentralised jobs are down for relocation to NSS-designated hubs or gateways.
One benign by-product of all this: a new party game for Christmas (when conversation about the fiscal stance of Budget 2004 flags, perhaps). It's called DIY Decentralisation and it simply involves matching government offices/departments with towns and villages around the State.
Here's a few to get you going: Department of Health to Hospital; Department of Education to Schull; Department of Transport to be split between Rhode and Rush; Department of Justice to Courtown; Houses of the Oireachtas to Recess in Connemara and, my favourite, the Public Service Benchmarking Body to Moneypoint (their files and research reports could be used to fuel the power station).
And a new job for Charlie McCreevy? Well he could be reshuffled to a post heading up the Combat Poverty Agency, which could be conveniently decentralised to Prosperous in his own constituency.
Jim O'Leary is currently lecturing in economics at NUI-Maynooth. He can be contacted at jim.oleary@may.ie
