OPINION:Out of the linguistic fog emerge comparable approaches to the crisis by the major parties, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
ONE MARK that a system is struggling to cope with new conditions is that it starts to suffer from linguistic anxiety. Words become tripwires. And last week, the words in question were peculiarly appropriate to our present political circumstances.
The first was "lacuna" - a gap, blank or missing page. When Eamon Gilmore used it the Dáil dissolved into a surreal word-association game. Padraic McCormack mentioned "Lacuna jail"; Joan Burton wondered if the reference was really to a "laguna"; Mary Coughlan announced that "there are no legislative proposals on lacunae. I do not know whether lacunae would deal with lagoons, because that is what one would actually have if a space was filled with water" and then remarked that "there is also a Disney song about lacunae" - a reference apparently to Hakuna Matatafrom The Lion King.
Almost as bizarre was a discussion on Morning Irelandbetween Bertie Ahern's former adviser Gerry Howlin and the former Fine Gael minister Ivan Yates. Discussing the Irish Timespoll, Howlin announced that "economic Teutonic plates have just shifted comprehensively". Yates agreed that these Teutonic plates were indeed shifting. It took a slightly embarrassed Áine Lawlor to remind listeners that the phrase they were grasping after was not about German kitchenware but was in fact "tectonic plates", the pieces of the Earth's crust and uppermost mantle, together referred to as the lithosphere, which, when they move, either colliding, grinding together or pulling apart, create mountains, troughs, earthquakes and volcanos.
Weird as all of this linguistic confusion might be, it is also oddly eloquent. Because if you put a tectonic shift together with a lacuna (or even a Teutonic shift together with a laguna), you get a pretty good description of where our political system currently lies.
A historic global change is happening all around us and we've got a very large gap in our capacity to shape an adequate political response.
It is undoubtedly true that, as the Irish Timespoll suggests, political loyalties are on the move. At one level, that move is highly significant - voters are now willing to go straight from Fianna Fáil to Fine Gael. The tribal taboos are less and less effective. At a deeper level, though, that shift delivers relatively little in the way of real political choice.
The problem is that Fine Gael has been able to capture an anti-Government mood that is based on resentment of an approach that Fine Gael itself would pursue if it were in power. If Enda Kenny were taoiseach, his team would undoubtedly bring a fresh energy and it could hardly be worse than the current intellectual and moral lacunae. However, its basic response to economic and fiscal crises would be more of the same.
The party's staunch opposition to the actual cutbacks disguises that it actually favours even larger cuts in spending. It wants to take at least €4.5 billion out of exchequer spending next year. Since it also wants to keep the National Development Plan intact and to keep paying into the Pension Reserve Fund, all of this money would have to come from current spending. It proposes to cut 3 per cent from every single Government department.
To put this into perspective, even the Government's Budget includes modest increases in two departments - social welfare and education. This is because the young population is rising fast, necessitating more spending just to keep services going, and unemployment is rising, creating a much bigger demand for welfare payments. Fine Gael's plans would mean, in effect, much larger cuts in the education system and drastic reductions in welfare benefits.
And why would Fine Gael do this? Because it is utterly and ideologically opposed to the notion that Government revenues could be increased by taxing those who have done so well from the last decade. It will not close tax shelters or introduce a progressive taxation system. As the party's policy document puts it, "It is not fair or wise to raise taxes in response to this Government's failure to control spending or manage the economy. More than any other time in our recent history, we need to maintain incentives for entrepreneurs." A Fine Gael-led government would be hitting public services even harder than the current Coalition is doing.
It's all very well to criticise the cack-handed implementation of the Budget, but it is dishonest to give the impression that Fine Gael is fundamentally at odds with the Government's approach.
There are two coherent sets of responses to the crisis. One is the abandonment of trickle-down economics and the move to a new kind of social democracy that places sustainability (social, economic and environmental) at its heart. The other is to keep pretending this is a temporary problem and that we can shrink our State while everyone else is expanding theirs. Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are firmly in the second camp and it is time they put that fundamental agreement into practice.