I can almost take the cynical nature of the huge 2015 supplementary Budget being slipped through by the current administration at the weekend.
There’s an election coming after all - we all know how buoyant tax receipts have been - and some of us were aware this was the last chance, under EU rules, for this type of budgetary sleight of hand.
No, it’s the sanctimonious rhetoric that this administration specialises in, that sticks in the craw.
Spare us the sustained lecture from the high moral and political ground that these guys differ in terms of transparency, financial discipline, strategic planning and every other public good imaginable, from the diabolic previous government they succeeded and indeed from every other group of self-interested politicians that ever governed us.
"Grow up. Don’t try to convince us you’re a new political species. Treat us like adults, and you know, we’ll probably revert to type too and let ourselves be bought."
In the weeks coming up to the Budget, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Brendan Howlin, was overheard criticising the “incontinent” nature of his ministerial colleagues, both in terms of the scale of the budgetary resources they felt they required and the alacrity with which they and their advisers were leaking those same requirements to the media.
The implication of his tone was that his misguided colleagues could bleat and leak all they liked but they might as well be whistling Dixie as attempt to move himself and Michael Noonan from their entrenched positions as guardians of the new Irish fiscal landscape. Well so much for that.
Having attempted to convince us things would be different this time, they proceeded to explain away the massive additional spend this year as a new form of transparency. Sure hadn’t it been highlighted in lights for the first time, prior to the budget rather than slipped through surreptitiously in the dark festive days of December.
Yeah, right. That kind of post facto rationalisation is the public relations equivalent of being knocked down by a car and then reversed over by the driver.
It could be argued that some of the additional spending was inevitable, such as a proportion of the annual top-up of the health budget; and some of the spending will address front-line service delivery needs such as the additional Gardai, teachers and nurses.
But there was no attempt at accompanying commentary or analysis to acknowledge that throwing hundreds of millions at the health service every year seems to make no difference to service quality - or that due to unreformed pension structures and performance management processes, hundreds of additional public servants will add for decades to the same public sector pay anomalies that we have become long accustomed to.
In other words, the huge splurge of additional spending in 2015 is presented as a timely response to the austerity of the past seven years rather than the same old pre-election tradition of greasing the palms of as many different constituencies as possible. Plus ca change?
Grow up lads. We all know the only real difference over the past six years has been that we had no option, due to the threat of national bankruptcy and the diktats of the Troika, than to take the collective measures we did.
We also know the principal reasons for our current economic recovery: the renewed competitiveness that arose from our crisis period cost-cutting; historically low interest rates and a very favourable euro exchange rate versus the dollar and sterling.
And we suspect that the budgetary landscape presided over the next five years by whatever administration we elect, wouldn’t be as disciplined without the new technical constraints imposed by the Euro-zone Stability and Growth Pact.
Grow up. Don’t try to convince us you’re a new political species. Treat us like adults, and you know, we’ll probably revert to type too and let ourselves be bought.
