To describe the Coalition as pursuing left-wing policies is seriously delusional, writes Ruairi Quinn
Dan O'Brien (Opinion, June 17th - "Left, right, left, right, left, left, left ...") is selective in his analysis of the impact of ideology on Irish political performance.
He concludes, dismissing ideology along the way, that it is more important that what is done actually works. So let us examine the performance of this Government.
In June 1997 it was handed an economy in the best condition that any administration ever received. The euro, agreed politically in 1996, guaranteed exchange rate stability and steady, low interest rates. The move to a low, single integrated corporation tax rate of 12 per cent had been agreed with the Commission. All the other macro-economic indicators were positive. And the medium-term PRSI was for a steady 5 per cent annum growth over the next five to 10 years.
So what was the response of this new "non-ideological" Government. It consistently overheated the economy, driving up demand for housing and childcare, among other things, with little regard for the consequences to the supply side and inflation.
By common consent there was a rapidly-emerging infrastructural deficit throughout the country. Not just road and rail transport, but clean water, sanitary services, serviced building land and telecommunications, including broadband, had to be addressed in an urgent and coherent way in the late 1990s.
The response was a new National Development Plan. However, it was tailored to the constraints of the structure and timeframe, seven years, of the European Union Community Support Framework. What was required was a longer realistic timeframe of at least 10 years, including from the outset a clear national spatial plan and a specific Department of Infrastructure to drive the entire project in a coherent and integrated way.
Instead, a committee was to co-ordinate the National Development Plan across all the various Departments. According to Minister Martin, the Taoiseach himself was the overall project manager.
Well, let us look where we are at after six years, five with the NDP and Taoiseach and one extra year with the Department of Transport but with no responsibility for implementing the National Spatial Strategy which was finally published some 5½ years after the coalition came into office in 1997.
The massive inflation in infrastructure costs - time delays, administrative charges, acquisition costs, legal charges and construction costs - have been enormous, but they have virtually all been under the control of this Government.
The chaos, disruption and major cost overruns are the responsibility of the project manager and his team.
But Dan O'Brien discounts ideology and looks at what really works. If this team is not working in the area where it has real overall control is it because it is incompetent or is its own form of ideology interfering with its management? It certainly does not lack experience. The present Cabinet has 95 years of ministerial office.
What it faced in June 1997 was a unique new problem, a crisis of success. It brought to that problem old solutions informed by old ideological prejudices no longer, if ever, appropriate. Tax was already under control. CPT was heading to 12.5 per cent. Income tax had fallen significantly in real terms. Interest rates no longer drove wage demands and the rising level of employment was responding positively to the new business-friendly environment of the Irish economy four years after the Culliton Report recommendations had been implemented.
Massive traffic jams and the absence of a real childcare support system, to mention but two items, demonstrate that the old ideological recipes are not working.
The confusion in failing to distinguish between borrowing for capital investment and for day-to-day expenditure prevents the Government from dealing with the infrastructural deficit.
The citation by the Taoiseach of the constraints of the Stability and Growth Pact is a smoke screen. The persistent investment in the short-term in the National Pension Reserve Fund with a weak equity market is both bad politics and incompetent business judgment.
This Government is the most ideological right-wing one we have ever had. Its prejudices are preventing it from being pragmatic in the way in which Dan O'Brien so admires.
We now have a very expensive country, with high costs and poor public services.
Inflation is double the European Union average, and its recent slight fall, due to the weakness of the dollar, will not address domestically-generated inflation.
Only coherently-introduced measures to address the infrastructural deficit will start to bring down domestic costs. But other inflationary functions, such as insurance and legal services, despite all the promises, have not been confronted.
Consolidating the potential performance of the Irish economy is primarily a matter for Government intervention in a number of areas.
But this Government, with its reliance on private sector and market mechanisms, is loath to intervene.
For example, the substantial additional employment in new Dublin hotels will increasingly depend on the construction of a proper conference hall and a modern 70,000-seater football stadium if we are to maintain employment.
Yet these major projects are stalled because the private sector will not respond, and the State is paralysed because it claims it does not have the money and anyway does not want to fund.
But the cost of the SIAs over the construction period of both projects listed above will amount to €2.5 billion.
Ireland has never had a left of centre government in office for a significant period of time to enable it to shape our society. We are the only such country in Europe. It is for that reason, across a whole array of indicators of equality, that Ireland consistently comes close to the bottom of the league table.
The crude analysis of so-called socialist profligacy trotted out by Dan O'Brien at the outset of his article bears no relation to the reality of modern social democratic political management and reform of economies in such diverse countries as Finland, Greece, Denmark, Portugal and Spain.
This Government is failing to deliver because its ideological prejudices are getting in the way of common sense solutions.
Its manipulation of the business cycle to coincide with the political electoral cycle saw a splurge of unsustainable spending from 2000 to polling day and a savage cutback put in place within days of the new Government coming into office.
A cocktail of bad politics, bad ideology and bad management for which Irish people are now suffering.
We are confronted with the paradox of a nation that can so wonderfully organise the Special Olympics and a Government that has brought Red Cow Disease to the country's infrastructure.
Ruairí Quinn TD is former leader of the Labour Party and former minister for finance