UNDOUBTEDLY the most spectacularly unreal promise of the campaign so far is Fianna Fail's pledge to increase Irish fish quotas. This is a bit like promising to increase the EU structural funds or milk quotas - no Irish government can do it. Or rather it can do it by (a) a miraculous increase in fish stocks, (b) withdrawing from the EU or (c) trading off some gains for fishing communities against losses for farmers.
Fish quotas are, under the Common Fisheries Policy, set by the Commission. Few people would deny that Ireland has lost out in the operation of the policy. Ireland had, before the accession of Sweden and Finland, 16 per cent of the total EU seas within 200 miles of its coast, but less than 5 per cent of the total catch in EU waters.
This, however, is a result of the decision, at the time of our entry to what was then the EEC, to trade off the interests of fishermen against those of farmers. The conditions for Ireland's entry were, of course, negotiated by a Fianna Fail minister, Patrick Hillery.
Every attempt to claw back the concessions that were made then has failed. And because over-fishing has threatened the very survival of fish stocks in EU waters, just keeping quotas at their current levels, never mind increasing them, will be an enormous challenge. In any case, some of our current quota of white fish is not even being caught because the Irish fleet is too dilapidated to do so.
Opportunities to renegotiate the basis of the Common Fisheries Policy are rare. The next fundamental review - when a fulfilment of the Fianna Fail pledge might in theory be possible - will be, remarkably enough, in 2002, about the time the next government should be leaving office. The only remaining question about this promise, therefore, is whether it is a red herring, a flounder or just a complete cod.
ONE OF Labour's most emphatic promises in its education proposals is a strong commitment to "life-long learning", in other words, to adult and second-chance education. It gives, in particular, enthusiastic support to the two successful schemes operating in this area, Youthreach and the Vocational Training Opportunities Scheme (VTOS).
Yet it is worth remembering what happened in September 1995, when Ruairi Quinn needed to make modest cutbacks in the levels of government expenditure projected in that year's budget, and each Department had to find some savings. What schemes were targeted for cutbacks by Niamh Bhreathnach, the Labour Minister in charge of a Department of Education budget approaching £2 billion? Youthreach and VTOS, of course.
Niamh Bhreathnach proposed to cut the number of VTOS places from 5,000 to 4,000. This could not save the State as a whole much money - only about £1 million - since the 1,000 people who would have been studying for a Leaving Certificate would instead be paid exactly the same amount in dole money. But it did save the Department of Education about £5 million by transferring the costs of these payments back to the Department of Social Welfare.
It is remarkable, too, that the Education Bill published recently by Niamh Bhreathnach almost entirely ignores the subject of second-chance education. The Bill has nothing to say about community and adult education, except that a school may be defined as an institution which "may also provide courses in adult, continuing, or vocational education" and that the Education Boards it proposes should co-ordinate such programmes.
Yet everyone involved in second-chance education has been pleading for a statutory framework to give some stability to the "impermanent and discretionary" nature of its funding. According to Dr Tom Collins, director of the Centre for Adult and Community Education at St Patrick's College, Maynooth, "there is no sense in which the statutory footing of adult and community education is enhanced or extended in any way by this Bill. Regardless of its achievements or its potential, the Bill has left the sector still without a home. .. the official view of what constitutes education, on the evidence of this Bill, is not inclusive of the work or the objectives of adult and community education."
So how strong a commitment is a strong commitment?
