‘THIS IS the shape of things to come,” the German official told this paper of the release of budget details to the Bundestag’s finance committee. “We’re going to have to talk a lot more to each other about our budget process, that’s a lesson of the crisis.” But, he added: “there’s no rule that you have to give German MPs information before your own.”
That’s the point in a nutshell. This was no “leak” anyway, but a deliberate official disclosure in line with German guidelines for participation in the EFSF bailout of information of a kind that will and should become increasingly common. And the “scandal” is not that the Germans passed on information to MPs, but that our Government did not to ours. (Although, in truth, there was precious little not already in the public domain).
Traditionally the secrecy attached to budgets here has meant firm injunctions even on Budget Day from the Ceann Comhairle to TDs not to reveal the tiniest smidgen of its contents until the Minister has spoken. Minister Phil Hogan knows this only too painfully. When junior minister in the Bruton rainbow government he was forced to resign when an overzealous aide sent out a press release a few minutes early.
In recent times, however, some welcome efforts have been made to move towards a more continental system in which the budget is not a “big bang” moment, but more of a process, and one in which parliamentarians may rightly be engaged at an earlier stage.
The somewhat sparse estimates announcement a few days ahead of a budget, has been supplemented by one on the capital programme and this year by Minister for Public Expenditure Brendan Howlin’s spending review. The VAT increases and the property tax have already, with much else in this year’s budget, been pre-announced, although proposed phasing had not. Why not, is not clear, and Ministers’ huffing and puffing about “leaks” is over the top. What they should be doing is engaging with TDs to create new mechanisms to involve them earlier in the budgetary process.
Nor should politicians and commentators get too carried away with hysterical talk of loss of sovereignty and the country being run from Berlin. Taoiseach Enda Kenny admitted yesterday, “We have . . . lost our economic sovereignty as we cannot [alone] form government policy without co-ordinating it with the EU, the IMF and the ECB.” But there’s a world of a difference between diktats from Berlin and co-ordination, and between loss of sovereignty and pooling of sovereignty with accountable institutions of which we are part.
Chancellor Angela Merkel insists that all she is talking about is “limited treaty change” to give a legal basis for such collective accountability which Germany sees as a prerequisite for any form of collective sharing of euro zone risk. That means applying to the rest of the euro zone and to Germany itself the sort of budget scrutiny which the Bundestag is involved in with respect to Ireland. A taste of its own medicine, and the sort of scrutiny any prudent lender would quite understandably want of a borrower. What’s so difficult about that?