What do we expect of our governments? asks Fintan O'Toole.If the major parties are to be believed, there are two answers: very little, and less than we used to.
Amid all the claims and counter-claims of the election campaign, it is easy to miss a depressing fact: our leaders and would-be leaders are setting less ambitious goals than they did five years ago. They seem to have concluded that the more prosperous we become, the less we want to achieve.
In its 2002 election manifesto, Fianna Fáil made a bold pledge: "For the next five years we are setting the historic target of effectively ending consistent poverty in our country, with a minimum target of reducing it to below 2 per cent." This was, indeed, a historic target, and it was included in the Programme for Government. It spoke of an ambition appropriate to a country enjoying the best of times.
This promise is nowhere to be found in the 2007 manifesto. It might, after all, be embarrassing to repeat a promise that has been so flagrantly broken. According to the Central Statistics Office report Measuring Ireland's Progress,7 per cent of Irish people, 10 per cent of Irish children and 17 per cent of people with a chronic illness or disability are now living in consistent poverty. The level of consistent poverty is, in other words, well over three times the minimum target that Fianna Fáil set itself in 2002. Oddly, the party does not suggest that what it promised to do in 2002 can't be done.
The current manifesto says: "The achievements of the last 10 years confirm that we have the possibility of becoming one of the few countries in the world to effectively eliminate consistent poverty." And, er, that's it. There is now no commitment to any target for poverty reduction. The message seems to be: we could do it, but we didn't do it last time, and we're not planning to do it next time either.
The Fine Gael manifesto is, if anything, even less promising. It mentions poverty twice and sets no targets. The manifestoes of the two major political parties in the State between them mention the word "poverty" a total of 11 times in 241 pages.
Oddly enough, the only parties that now set the explicit goal of eliminating poverty are Sinn Féin and the PDs. Sinn Féin describes the goal as a "priority" and proposes to achieve it by increases in welfare payments and the minimum wage. The PDs say that they are "strongly committed to eliminating this remaining poverty from our society".
But what they're actually committed to is "the reduction in the number of those experiencing consistent poverty to between 2 per cent and 4 per cent by 2012, with the aim of eliminating consistent poverty by 2016". This commitment does not feature in the "seven pledges to the Irish people" that the party sets out as its core demands for any programme for government. And it would allow the level of consistent poverty to be twice as high in 2012 as it was supposed to be in 2007 under the Programme for Government the PDs agreed with Fianna Fáil in 2002.
If the elimination of consistent poverty has virtually disappeared as a tangible goal of Irish politics, so has the ending of the other great marker of social inequality: the two-tier health service. In 2002, both Fine Gael and Labour committed themselves to introducing a universal health insurance system, thus ending the divide between those who have insurance and those who do not. This time out, while both parties remain theoretically committed to such a shift, they are proposing merely to "move towards" its introduction.
Another political goal that has gone off the radar this time around is a ban on corporate donations to political parties. Fine Gael went into the last election occupying the moral high ground, having refused to accept corporate funding since the election of Michael Noonan as leader in February 2001. One of Enda Kenny's first acts as leader was to put out the begging bowl again, and the 2007 manifesto has nothing to say about the funding of political parties.
Labour describes a ban as "not constitutionally feasible" and proposes limits instead. Fianna Fáil's Dermot Ahern suggested in August 2003 that the scrapping of corporate donations should be considered. If it was considered, it was considered a step too far. This year's glossy manifesto, paid for no doubt in part by generous donors, has nothing to say on the subject.
Big ideas are out, even when there is a broad consensus about their centrality to Ireland's future. The work of the National Economic and Social Council on the challenge of integrating welfare and innovation in a knowledge economy is virtually ignored. The terms "knowledge economy" or "knowledge-based economy" appear once in Fianna Fáil's manifesto, three times in the PDs', seven times in Labour's and not at all in the manifestoes of Fine Gael, the Greens and Sinn Féin.
Some people may see this lowering of the bar as a welcome dose of realism. But given that governments routinely fall short of their targets, isn't it better that they fail to achieve high ambitions than low aspirations?