Mary Harney wants to raise €8 billion over the next five years by selling State companies, writes Denis Coghlan, Chief Political Correspondent
The Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise and Employment was telling it straight. Economic buoyancy could not generate the kind of money required for future capital investment under the National Development Plan, as Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael pretended. The cash would have to be found elsewhere and the Progressive Democrats had a cunning plan.
It was a relatively painless project. State companies, with sizeable worker shareholdings, would be sold. Both investors and workers would benefit, even if the consumer eventually paid the price. Some of the long-term savings from the Central Bank would go to pay the piper.
A total of €6 billion could be raised through the sale of the ESB and Bord Gáis, Ms Harney said, and a further €2 billion would be taken from the surplus foreign reserves of the Central Bank, as soon as it had sorted out its affairs with the ECB. Further cash could be raised through the sale of Aer Lingus and the ports of Dublin, Cork and Waterford.
Given Charlie McCreevy's raid on the Central Bank in his last Budget, when the Minister for Finance took the surplus raised from the euro launch, there was a hint of clothes-stealing about the project. But Mary Harney didn't mind her party setting the political agenda for the election campaign. If Bertie Ahern couldn't make up his mind and call the general election, he could expect some slippage in policy ideas.
Funding for infrastructural development spending was the PDs' big idea. A great deal of its glossy 90-page manifesto reflected the policies and programmes of the Coalition in which they participated for the past five years.
That was only to be expected but, as a party campaigning on an independent platform, it had to put some distance between itself and Fianna Fáil.
It differed with John O'Donoghue over the need to appoint a Garda Ombudsman. It reopened its campaign to reduce the top rate of income tax from 42 to 40 per cent and promised tax breaks on share options. It gazumped Mary O'Rourke efforts to develop a modern regional rail system. It cut across Síle de Valera by offering to review RTÉ licence fees within three months and it repackaged Charlie McCreevy's offer to decentralise 10,000 civil and public servants.
The Campus Ireland Stadium was a gift. Mary Harney thought it far too expensive, at €1 billion, at this stage of our economic development and she wouldn't support its construction. But, if it became a make-or-break point in negotiations for government, she wouldn't rule out a cheaper model.
Although the PDs wished to display their separate credentials and policies to attract preferential votes from all other parties, their immediate future lay with Fianna Fáil. They were concerned the public might give that party sufficient votes to form a single-party government, with the support of independent TDs.
Coalition, Ms Harney insisted, had served the country well and had given stable and good government. "For Ireland to step away from coalition now would be to step backwards," she said.
It was all about the future. The Progressive Democrats didn't want to maintain capital spending at existing levels; they wanted to accelerate it and to maximise economic growth.
Although the party's projections for capital spending and its methods for funding it grabbed attention, its ambition to limit increases in current spending promised industrial unrest.
Current spending increases for the next five years would be pegged at 8 per cent, down from a projected 14.5 per cent this year. However, with the public pay bill rising by an estimated 10 per cent a year, even before the benchmarking process is completed next June, that figure of 8 per cent looks excessively ambitious.
On the social side, the commitments entered into recently by the Government and the social partners were taken on board. Target increases for pensions, social services and child support were pencilled in for 2007. The party set its face against a universal health insurance system and noted it wasn't a priority to give free GP services to those who could afford them.