The most important single issue in domestic politics is, or at any rate ought to be, the deployment of available resources in the interests of the community.
Some of the resources taken by the State in taxation are used up in providing public services, such as education or hospital treatment, and others are transferred in the form of income to individuals who because of age, infirmity, or some other incapacity are unable to earn through the market system sufficient to support themselves.
What must immediately be obvious is that all these operations involve quantification: deciding precisely how much to take from everyone, how much to spend on each service, and how much to transfer to each individual in need.
In practice it is, of course, impossible to carry out a fresh exercise of quantification along these lines each year. Instead the public authorities use the preceding year as a base and simply add, or very occasionally subtract, some marginal amount from the provision made under each heading.
This annual process is necessarily both piecemeal and shortsighted, but government has found it difficult to do the job any other way because of uncertainty about both resources available and needs to be met more than a year ahead. Indeed, even for as short a period as a year ahead, predictions of both resources and needs have often proved faulty.
In recent years an attempt has been made to place these marginal annual decisions in a slightly longer framework. Thus Budget documentation for the current year published last April includes quite a long section entitled "Ireland's Stability Programme 1999 to 2001", which includes forecasts of economic growth, private and public consumption, investment, employment, unemployment, and key public finance and budgetary figures up to and including the year 2001.
This kind of advance budgeting, based on explicit assumptions as to economic growth etc is a major step forward. But two years ahead is still a very short framework for long-term planning, especially given the length of time it takes for many government decisions to be implemented.
The truth is that with a two-year advance framework of this kind, decisions on resource allocation still tend to be made on the same marginal basis as in the case of the annual budget itself, rather than being strategic in character.
However, the Medium-Term Review, the latest of which was published by the ESRI last Wednesday, does provide a basis for genuine strategic planning. For we know from the experience of the six previous Medium-Term Reviews published since 1986 that it is only in exceptional circumstances, such as the economic downturn created by German reunification, that these medium-term projections are likely to prove over-optimistic, and so advance plans for long-term public spending strategies can with reasonable safety be made on this basis.
THUS, instead of fiddling around with marginal changes in public spending and taxes each year, changes often distorted by the pressure of current events, it is now open to our politicians to plan five or even 10 years ahead.
In the Irish case this is particularly important. For although in the near future our growth rate is going to decline from its recent exceptional level, and will tend during the decade ahead to drift gradually downwards, nevertheless throughout this period, but almost certainly not for much longer than this decade, our economy will be growing faster than is likely to be the case with our European neighbours.
So, if we are going to put right those things wrong with our society that are capable of being put right with additional material resources, we have to plan now precisely how we are going to do so.
Everything depends on the choices we need to make now between the five purposes to which we can put additional resources, viz improving public services, increasing social transfers, improving our infrastructure, reducing the burden of taxation, or building up a nest-egg to help us ride out future difficulties.
Some people will put more emphasis on better public and social services rather than on taxation cuts; others will want to give priority to improving our defective infrastructure, the inadequacy of which could slow future growth.
Others again will have an ideological preference for tax cuts. And others may be primarily concerned about safeguarding our longer-term future by building up surpluses to be drawn on as and when future recessions occur.
These choices are, or at any rate should be, the very stuff of party politics. Shifts and changes in the priorities given to each of these objectives are the issues on which elections should be fought and decided.
But arguing the merits of these alternatives in the abstract, as so often happens in politics, is a waste of time and intellectual energy. Effective policy-making involves making quantitative decisions about the uses to which additional resources are to be put.
And, curiously, our political system as it currently operates does not seem well adapted to this quantitative task. Despite the fact that there have already been six Medium-Term Term Reviews, providing the necessary basis for quantified debate on policies, there has yet to be serious political discussion of this quantified kind.
Instead, political position-taking tends to consist of sweeping non-quantified statements, which have little or no practical value.
The time has now come for serious quantified debate on these real issues, and the latest Medium-Term Review provides a solid basis for such a discussion. Necessarily, this review suggests possible targets for each of these elements of future policy. But these are no more than suggestions, intended and designed to provoke policy debate among politicians. For it is the elected politicians and not the ESRI who must decide these issues.
Let me suggest some of the issues raised by this review, about which politicians should now be starting to argue:
Should we continue the present allocation of one-quarter of national output to investment, as projected in the review, or should we increase it in order to speed up the removal of infrastructure bottlenecks?
Should we, as the figures in the review suggest, set aside budget surpluses large enough to wipe out our national debt within a decade, or should we be a little less ambitious and thus release more resources for current purposes?
Should we make it a priority to reduce the overall tax burden by one-eighth by the year 2010, as projected in the review, or should we instead make more modest cuts and put more effort into improving public services?
And, during this last decade of exceptional economic growth, should we perhaps make the minimisation of poverty our priority target, at the expense perhaps of less rapid cuts in taxation or in the national debt?
I suppose that before the televised hearings of the Public Accounts Committee many voters would have cynically dismissed the technical capacity of Dail deputies to undertake serious debate on key policy issues of this kind. But, as these hearings have shown in microcosm, the fact is that the Oireachtas contains people with a wide range of skills and considerable intellectual capacity.
The trouble is that a combination of the artificially adversarial character of party politics and the atmosphere of the Dail chamber itself are not conducive to constructive debate on serious matters.
But serious debates on longterm policy issues could be organised in an Oireachtas committee comprising well-qualified TDs representing different party viewpoints and removed, as the Public Accounts Committee has shown is possible, from the artificially combative atmosphere of the Dail itself.
It should perhaps be said that even without such a structured committee debate on issues of this kind, the last 2 1/2 years have seen the beginnings of serious debate of this kind between our parties; debate moreover which actually influenced the policy being followed by the Government.
The future shape of our society from 2010 will be determined by the manner in which politicians decide to use the exceptional flow of additional resources that will become available to us during this next crucial decade. What they decide to do with this temporary burst of wealth creation is thus of unique importance. They should now get down to debating in a serious way the key policy issues raised by the ESRI's seventh Medium-Term Review.
For no such opportunity to transform our whole society is ever likely to recur. It is now or never.