Even the toughest budgetary measures may not be enough to prevent Europe from taking over our affairs, writes STEPHEN COLLINS
THE GREEN Party initiative to get some kind of political consensus on a framework for dealing with our grave economic crisis was greeted with a cool response not just from the Opposition parties but from the Taoiseach as well.
While it has become increasingly obvious that politics as usual is not going to get the country out of its current plight it seems that our leading politicians are still struggling to come up with an approach that will genuinely put the national interest first.
A number of elder statesmen like Garret FitzGerald, Ray MacSharry and Peter Sutherland have spoken out in recent times in an effort to get the political system to focus on fundamental economic issues but it seems they have been wasting their sweetness on the desert air, so far at least.
The reaction of Fianna Fáil to the Green Party initiative was almost as suspicious as that of the Opposition parties. One of the problems was the junior Coalition party did not prepare the ground with its Government partners, never mind the Opposition, and left itself wide open to the accusations of a stunt. To be fair to the Greens, their effort to get everybody focused on the scale of the threat was worthwhile in itself.
Cowen’s cool response to the notion of a private forum at which the party leaders could have a genuine exchange of views on what needs to be done was based on traditional notions of adversarial politics that may well become irrelevant in the near future.
That it has proved impossible to get a political consensus even on the need for a high-level discussion about budgetary options, never mind agreement on action, is a poor reflection on the ability of our political system to deal with the greatest threat to national sovereignty since the second World War.
What is truly depressing is there seems to be so little appreciation across the political spectrum of the scale of the threat. It is virtually impossible to overstate the extent of the crisis in the public finances and there is no guarantee that even the toughest form of adjustment will now be enough to stave off the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund taking over the running of our affairs.
There is every chance that our economic independence is in its last days, thanks entirely to the incompetence we have displayed in running our own affairs, and the Greens at least made an effort to highlight that. Cowen’s implicit rejection of their approach is clearly based on the calculation that there is no realistic prospect of Fine Gael and Labour accepting the Government’s four-year plan so the Coalition might as well get on with it and make its own decisions.
The best that can be hoped for now is that the Government will come forward with a coherent four-year plan in a month’s time and that the Opposition parties, after detailed briefings from a senior Department of Finance official, will put forward credible plans of their own.
At that stage the electorate should be given the chance to give its verdict on the alternative recovery plans. A debate about the real issues facing the country is required to educate the public about the choices available and to give whatever Government emerges the moral authority to do what is necessary to preserve our economic independence.
However, an early election will not happen if the Taoiseach has anything to do with it. He seems determined to publish the four-year plan, which will commit any subsequent administration to specific measures as well as overall budget targets, and then to press on with the budget and get it through the Dáil.
While the Coalition’s chances of surviving next year are open to question, that is not the way Fianna Fáil TDs see it. They have become used to surviving political upsets and many of them fancy their chances of making it to autumn 2011 if they make it through the budget. That assumes that the Greens will hang in there until the bitter end because they face even greater carnage than Fianna Fáil. On form it is hard to argue with that calculation but something strange happened to the Greens in the past few days and it may have serious implications for relations between the two Coalition parties.
One theory is that the stark reality of the budget choices confronting the Coalition was made clear at Thursday’s Cabinet meeting and spooked the Greens. With their attempt to build some kind of cross-party consensus scorned, the party is left naked in Fianna Fáil’s embrace to await its electoral fate.
The Opposition parties don’t have a lot to be complacent about either, despite their standing in the polls. Once they have been briefed by the Department of Finance, Fine Gael and Labour will have to come up with coherent and realistic policies to demonstrate they are capable of exercising power. It won’t wash to simply blame Fianna Fáil for landing the country in its current mess, fair as that charge is. Both Opposition parties will have to spell out how they propose to reduce the budget deficit to 3 per cent of GDP by 2014.
In the Dáil during the week, Eamon Gilmore called on Tánaiste Mary Coughlan to acknowledge, which she duly did, that both Opposition parties had accepted the 3 per cent target. However, that is the easy part. The difficult part is to spell out how that is going to be achieved whether through measures such as a property tax, income tax increases, cuts in welfare spending or further cuts in the public service pay bill.
Fine Gael and Labour will have to convince not only the voters but the ECB and the international money markets that they are serious. Otherwise, the sweet taste of power could turn to ashes in their mouths as they find themselves presiding over the loss of Ireland’s economic sovereignty.