A speech made by the otherwise opaque Brian Cowen last year seems to indicate the new Taoiseach's desire to move towards a fairer society, with equality of opportunity for all - but is this commitment realistic or just rhetorical? asks Fintan O'Toole.
ON WEDNESDAY afternoon, when he rose to accept the Dáil's nomination for Taoiseach, Brian Cowen used the opportunity to plug an "excellent" book. When a man whose ideology has been as opaque as Cowen's chooses very deliberately to begin his leadership with praise for a book, he is surely dropping a tantalising suggestion about the ideas and values that will influence him.
Since little attention was paid to this part of his speech, readers might like to guess what the book was? Diarmuid Ferriter's much praised Judging Dev, perhaps, as a reminder of the republican virtues to which Cowen aspires? John Horgan's biography of Sean Lemass, a politician whose pragmatic patriotism he has namechecked with increasing frequency of late? Ray Mac Sharry's The Making of the Celtic Tiger, with its tidy moral that cutting public spending in the late 1980s paid dividends later? Bowling Alone, by the Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, whose address to the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party in 2005 was the culmination of a mild shift to the left in which Cowen himself replaced Charlie McCreevy as minister for finance? Or even Cecelia Ahern's Thanks for the Memories, both for its poignantly appropriate title and for the welcome proof that the beloved daughters of taoisigh can emerge happily from the turmoil of the political game?
None of the above. "I have been reading," said the taoiseach-elect, "Des Geraghty's excellent book, Forty Shades of Green, in recent days and his thesis is that we are now in a new space. What was once one of the most dispersed nations in the world is now becoming one of the most diverse nations and the change is visible and real." Apart from the delight it must have given to a small Irish publisher, Real Ireland, this ringing endorsement has two remarkable aspects. One is Cowen's attraction to the idea of a "new space", to an Ireland whose increasing ethnic complexity is celebrated in Geraghty's book. Far from looking backwards to his Fianna Fáil heritage, Cowen seems to be signalling that he recognises that the country he now leads would have been unrecognisable to most of his predecessors. The implication is that Cowen realises that social stability in Ireland can no longer draw on a simple sense of ethnic solidarity and has to find new social and civic foundations.
BUT MORE NOTEWORTHY still is the name of the author. It would have been hard for the new Taoiseach to think of a more stalwart figure of the left to namecheck in his inaugural speech. Geraghty is not just a lifelong trade unionist, from a family of agitators, who rose to become president of Siptu. He also has a long history of left-wing political activism, serving briefly in the European Parliament for the Workers Party and going on to help found the now-defunct Democratic Left. If Bertie Ahern famously declared himself one of only two socialists in the Dáil, was Brian Cowen hinting that he might like to be regarded as the other one?
Among the sentiments Geraghty expresses in the book that Cowen regards as "excellent" are, for example, the view that instead of growth for its own sake, we should be pursuing "a more people-friendly and eco-friendly form of economic development". He attacks "classical market-based globalisation" and the EU Services Directive, whose implementation has been driven in part by Cowen's party colleague, Charlie McCreevy. He calls for a change of emphasis from "the 'super-market' concept of Europe to one of a co-operative community of European peoples", in which the market would be shaped to social goals. In signalling his admiration for the book, was Cowen really dropping hints that he wants to shift Fianna Fáil at least somewhat to the left? Or was he just being a classic catch-all pragmatist who realises that Fianna Fáil's urban working-class support will miss Bertie Ahern's populism and needs to be mollified?
That such basic questions still need to be asked of a man who has now become the first in the history of the State to fill the four main government offices of taoiseach, tánaiste, foreign affairs and finance seems to tell its own story. If Brian Cowen is a conviction politician, his convictions ought to have become more apparent over almost a quarter of a century in public life. It is easy to suspect that he doesn't really have any.
To some degree, the sheer amount of attention paid to his Indecon Public Policy lecture at the Royal Irish Academy last November seems to bear this out. That speech has become the sacred scripture of political analysts, who like the Kremlinologists of old, have to read runes to decipher Cowen's intent. It looms so large, not because it is earth-shattering (it is often rather bland), but because it remains his one substantial public credo.
THE BELIEF SYSTEM outlined in that speech is one that Brian Cowen would probably call classic Irish republicanism, but it is really an articulation of the basic European "social market" model. It occupies the common ground between the mainstream western European political models of Christian democracy and social democracy. Cowen supports the market economy, but recognises that "while markets work, they don't work perfectly for everyone". He does not baulk at a degree of inequality - Cowen told his audience that "Of course differences will exist arising from variance in hard work, talent, skills and other factors".
The "of course" was especially eloquent, suggesting that the new Taoiseach could not even imagine a rough equality of economic outcomes. But he does believe, apparently strongly, in "full equality of opportunities". His speech, unfortunately, did not define what he means by this key phrase, which he posited as a "legitimate objective for the Irish Republic over the next decade". The only hint is that it is not quite what we have now, after the last decade of Fianna Fáil-led government: "areas of poverty and social exclusions remain and equality of opportunities has not been achieved".
This view of the world can hardly be described as left-wing, but it is certainly to the left of the classic Anglo-Saxon "free market" model. If "full equality of opportunities" is to be achieved under Brian Cowen's leadership by 2016 - the goal he set himself in that Indecon speech - the policy implications are reasonably stark. And Cowen himself outlined some of them, albeit in the sketchiest of terms, in that speech. Public spending on education, especially in the early years and in lifelong learning, will have to be massively increased. Working families on low incomes will have to receive sustained support. Disability services will have to be exponentially advanced. The taxation system, in Cowen's words, has to be reformed "to remove inequalities".
This would seem to promise a Cowen leadership underpinned by a drive towards a society in which, at the very least, every child enters adulthood with an equal chance of participating fully in society and the economy.
Individual responsibility would be encouraged, but naked individualism would be dampened down in favour of what he called on Wednesday "the pre-eminence of community and participation over self". So is this commitment rhetorical or real? And how will it stand up to the pressures of an economic downturn? It has to be said that, even in much easier times, Cowen, as minister for finance, did not manifest a passionate commitment to the goals he has set out in the last six months. His budgets had little impact on child poverty, and failed to achieve the stated government goal of eliminating consistent poverty by 2007. Public investment in primary education - the single most important instrument for enhancing equality of opportunity - remained very low and primary schools are now an average of €23,000 in debt, with a combined shortfall of more than €80 million. Cowen declined to fund a proposal from the National Economic and Social Forum (supported by all the social partners) calling for a universal pre-school education system, which would make a huge difference to disadvantaged children. The official Government target is to have "only" 317,000 adults with serious literacy difficulties by 2016 - a figure that in itself contradicts Cowen's aims of eliminating inequality of opportunity within the same time frame.
LIKEWISE, COWEN'S BELIEF that the taxation system needs to be reformed to remove the inequities that favour the wealthy finds only modest support in his track record as minister. His budgets were undoubtedly more redistributive than those of his predecessor, Charlie McCreevy, but this had more to do with reasonably generous welfare increases than with tax reform.
He did begin the process of closing off some of the more egregious tax reliefs whose use has meant that, on Revenue's most recent figures, three of the country's top 400 earners paid no tax at all, and 48 kept their tax liability below 5 per cent.
But he continued, for example, to spend almost as much on tax credits for private pensions as on the entire public pension system. His 2007 budget cut the top rate of tax from 42 per cent to 41 per cent, at a full year cost of €186 million. It delivered no saving for anyone earning less than €33,000, but €460 for someone earning €80,000. The 2008 budget widened the gap between the disposable income of a single person on long-term unemployment benefit and that of a single person earning €50,000 a year by €22 a week.
Even on a core value, elaborated in his Indecon speech, as specific as "mechanisms to effectively support working families and individuals on low incomes", Cowen's budgets failed to deliver. He kept his commitment to remove workers on the minimum wage from the tax net, but workers on, say, €15,000 a year have gained neither from his welfare increases nor from his tax cuts. He has rejected proposals from Cori Justice and others for refundable tax credits (one mechanism that benefits the lower paid), but, in the Indecon speech, essentially admitted that he has no better ideas himself: "There is . . . a challenge for policy-makers to find other mechanisms to effectively support those on low incomes."
If he has been only mildly effective as minister for finance in boom times in advancing the goals he set himself, how likely is he to do better as Taoiseach in straitened circumstances? In the Indecon speech, he set the "maintenance of public expenditure on health and education" at the top of his list of policies necessary to achieve equality of opportunity. In the context of a rising population and a new pay deal, even "maintenance" in these areas requires significant increases. But the immediate signals from the new government all suggested something very different.
Even before he had reached his new office in Merrion Street on Thursday morning, the new Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, was telling listeners of the need for "fiscal discipline", repeating the latter word three times in a short interview. He made it sound very much like a code word for effective cutbacks. Within hours, the new Minister for Education, Batt O'Keeffe (Cowen's most personal appointment to the Cabinet), was telling Eamon Keane on Newstalk that "we're not as flush with money as we used to be. So I won't be able to do all of the things that were perhaps done in the past and we're going to have to measure our expectation and performance and tailor that to the level of funding that is available within the Department." He went on to say that "from the zany heights, we're now back to the land of reality".
Already, the era in which primary schools were unable to meet their basic running costs while maintaining some of the largest class sizes in Europe, in which approximately 1,000 children each year failed to transfer from primary to post-primary school and half a million adults were functionally illiterate, is being redefined as a madcap era of opulence. Those are the zany heights from which we must descend into something called "reality".
LIKEWISE, IN THE health system, basic services that were scarcely adequate are being cut back as if they were the optional extras of an era of indulgence that has now passed.
And already, the very idea of widening the tax base as an alternative to cutbacks in public services is being treated a non-starter. Interviewed on his way into his new office on Thursday morning, Brian Lenihan managed to effectively pooh-pooh suggestions from such bastions of radicalism as the OECD and Chambers Ireland for new kinds of property taxation: "Most of our partner countries in the European Union have very substantial property taxes on private residential property, we don't . . . If there is an overwhelming popular demand to replace stamp duty with a property tax I will certainly examine it."
Since there is never an overwhelming popular demand for taxes, this was a pretty clear dismissal. We are left, then, with a very large gap between what Brian Cowen genuinely believes and what he seems likely to do. He clearly does have convictions: that social integration is even more important in a diverse society, and that gross inequalities are incompatible with both long-term stability and an innovative economy.
He believes the fruits of 15 years of extraordinary economic growth have not been used well enough to eliminate consistent poverty or create full equality of opportunity. He believes that the economy should serve society, rather than the other way around. And he knows that acting on these beliefs demands a consistent "option for the poor" that is reflected in tough policy choices.
But all of that runs very strongly against the default instincts of the pragmatic mainstream of which he has long been part. Those instincts are to treat social spending on vulnerable citizens as optional extras - very nice to indulge in when times are good but the first thing to go when sacrifices are to be made. There is enough evidence in what Brian Cowen has said to suggest that he doesn't believe that these short-term instincts serve Irish society well. But there is not, so far, much evidence in what Brian Cowen has done to suggest that he is willing to follow the logic of his own beliefs.
