"The economy will continue to grow rapidly for the next 18 months as long as the Government does not mess it up," the ESRI economist Terry Baker said just over a month ago. As long as the government does not mess it up. But what is there in the record of populist politicians to make us believe that they cannot ransack and debauch an economy? Did our political masters not take a functioning economy and bring us to the very verge of bankruptcy 20 years ago?
We have spent the past decade undoing the almost terminal damage done by the morally frivolous and financially profligate policies of successive governments from 1977 to 1989, when commandments from the World Bank and the arrival of the PDs in government finally caused us to put our house in order.
Caring contest
The PDs are now a busted flush, and the country is driven demented by the caring contest for the Phoenix Park; and meanwhile, the most interesting news story of the year slipped out almost unnoticed. Average public-sector earnings rose by 5.3 per cent in the year to March. In the private sector they rose by 3 per cent. Inflation stood at 1 per cent. When tax concessions are taken into account, public sector workers increased their income by 6.3 per cent.
This is a dazzling figure for people who actually are our employees. Their salaries are up by over 6 per cent, but our salaries - which go to pay their salaries - are up by barely half that amount.
We have been here before. Profligacy in the public sector, paid for with parachute-money which would never have to be returned (or so it was believed), laid the basis for the economic stagnation which damned nearly strangled us as an independent nation. We were the laughing stock of Europe and British journalists queued up to write knocking stories about the Irish experiment in self-government, ho ho ho.
They have been queuing up to write admiring articles about the Irish economy in recent times. For how much longer? The compulsion within the central Exchequer to be generous with the taxpayer's money is once again at work, and there is a heady sense of debauchery in the air. For the figures mentioned above do not tell the full story. Not included in those figures is the largesse which has been distributed to the public sector since they were compiled, and which included back-pay - inconceivable in the private sector.
Extraordinary increases
There have been extraordinary increases in certain areas of the public sector. Garda pay is up 15 per cent, prison officers up 17.1 per cent, clerical civil servants 9 per cent, primary school teachers up 6.8 per cent. Local authority workers' income rose by nearly 6 per cent; in commercially active semi-States, the increase was 8 per cent. Let me repeat: the increase in the private sector, which pays for all this beanfeast, was 3 per cent. And this does not take into account the differences between PRSI payments, which remain far lower for most public sector than private sector employees, nor does it take into account the extraordinary pension privileges of those in the public sector.
In other words, here we go again.
What right have we to feel confidence in those who govern us when in no time at all, the Government has made such a hames of the Bord Failte/Northern Ireland Tourist Board shared logo? Admittedly, those bruised souls in the NITB who entered the logo agreement with Bord Failte in good faith should not perhaps have expected too much sensitivity from the Minister concerned, James McDaid, who became the focus of controversy in 1991 for his appearance outside a Dublin court after the hearing of a case against an IRA terrorist, James Pius Clarke.
The not-so-pious Clarke broke out of the Maze prison in 1982 and was arrested in Donegal after a gun-battle in NITB land, namely Fermanagh, in which two men were killed. He was sentenced to two terms of imprisonment by the Special Criminal Court for offences which included armed hijacking and temporarily blinding prison officers with CS gas.
Ah well, boys will be boys, and let bygones be bygones and all that; though perhaps Fermanagh Protestants do not share the Minister's view of the episode. But that little reservation aside, is the Minister so totally contemptuous of other Northern feelings that he should have unilaterally dumped what the two tourist boards had spent over a year preparing?
Apparently, he is. At least it will give Northerners a notion of how genuinely their feelings are regarded by the Government in Dublin.
The most bizarre aspect of this ridiculous little farce is that, whether or not you like the logo, here was an example of unity in symbol, purpose and image for the two parts of Ireland - something the Minister is presumably not against. Yet his first deed on achieving office was to shatter that unity, without the least courtesy to the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, which had spent £500,000 co-developing the logo. The NITB is now in the ridiculous position of retaining a logo which was begun at the initiative of Bord Failte and dumped by Ministerial edict.
Real issue
Public money, raised from the taxpayers of the Republic, was squandered on this idiocy. It is a small example of what governments can do. But the real issue here is whether we need a Minister for Tourism at all. We already have a Government board in charge of the industry; what need is there for a Government Department to run a Government board?
Or, on the other hand, why should we have just two layers of Government supervising tourism? Could we not have a Department running a Ministry running a board running a state service running a council, all enjoying yearly income increases of 6.3 per cent for supervising the one bed-and-breakfast remaining in high-taxation Ireland? Yes, indeed: we have been here before.