At this stage, it seems likely that Fianna Fáil will lead the next government - against the background of a steep deterioration in the public finances. While the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, continues to talk down the prospect of securing an overall Dáil majority, such an eventuality should not be discounted. The alternatives involve the creation of a single party government, with support from a handful of Independent TDs; a Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrats-based coalition or an arrangement between Fianna Fáil and the Labour Party. In the absence of a major political controversy, Fine Gael is unlikely to generate the critical mass necessary to form the nucleus of an alternative government.
Fianna Fáil has devoted much of its energy to ridiculing the costings and the feasibility of the policies put forward by the Fine Gael and Labour parties and has warned that the country simply cannot afford them. By concentrating on economic details, rather than on broad social issues, Fianna Fáil has successfully contained public debate within the parameters it has chosen. It has also contrasted the political stability, economic growth and job creation of recent years with the uncertain prospects of a multi-party coalition. The campaign has been orchestrated on a number of levels and little has been left to chance. For more than six months now, the Government has publicly acknowledged social weaknesses and failures in relation to health, education, housing and crime. But, rather than defend its five-year record on those issues, it has unveiled costly new or revised policies and promised to do better next time.
The economic debate has, however, been a sham. And the public has been grossly misled because of the rapidly deteriorating public finances. All parties assumed the budgetary projections of the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, were soundly based and they constructed their manifesto promises and based their spending plans on those figures. It now appears, following publication of the Exchequer returns for the first four months of the year, that those expectations were wildly optimistic and will not be met. The annualised increase in Government spending is running at 21 per cent, even before the benchmarking process has been factored in. And income tax revenue has declined by 11 per cent, compared to last year. This represents a massive fiscal failure and the Government must take responsibility for it.
The opposition parties are unlikely to recast their manifestos in the light of these figures. Their traditional response has been to express dismay on finding the cupboard bare when they enter government. But Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats have no such escape mechanism. As the parties in government, they must now explain to the electorate how, and to what extent, they will restrain current expenditure; how they will respond to a benchmarking process that will add significantly to the public wage bill and what impact this will have on their other commitments.
The public finances are in such a perilous state that they require immediate correction. Waiting until 2003 is not an option.