Buckle Up- It's Going to be a Helluva Ride

Massive global forces have been unleashed in the past 12 months and Ireland has proved very vulnerable to their worst effects. Ours is one of the most open economies in the world. It’s also closely tied to the American economic cycle. Thanks to the influence of the Progressive Democrats, and their former sidekick in Fianna Fáil, Charlie McCreevy, it is also among the most lightly regulated. That was fine – or might have seemed it – when things were on the up but by jaysus it’s been anything but over the last year.

There’s no disputing that the Government will take an awful lot less tax than is needed to run the State’s services this year and next. But that’s where agreement ends.
Two battlegrounds have emerged from the storm. One of these, which will gather force over the coming months, is about changes in the education sector, such as class sizes. But the one that has dominated debate in the last weeks concerns the end of the universal medical card for over 70s.
Social historians are rather enjoying the echoes. For example, last May the Government approved the release of nine stamps marking the 100th anniversary of the old age pension. A column in the Examiner at the time caustically commented: “It was just as well the pension was introduced by the British government in 1908 because it is inconceivable that a native Irish government in the 1920s would have introduced something so generous.”
Meanness on the part of the Government is a motif that recurs through the social history of the State. By way of example, Ernest Blythe and Paddy McGilligan are accorded ogre status in folk memory for the reduction of the old age pension from ten shillings (60c) to nine shillings (54c) per week.
That cut more or less ended Blythe’s political career. Indeed, it played no small part in electing the first Fianna Fáil government in 1932. Another irony! The now deleted universal medical card to over 70s was introduced by Fianna Fáil more or less on the 70th anniversary of the party’s initial victory and was quietly celebrated on that basis by some of the more historically aware amongst their faithful.
Nowadays the old age pension is payable from age 66. Someone of that age would have just been born when Dáil Éireann met to hear the nomination of Members of Government in July, 1943. Contributing to the debate Dominick Cafferky, newly elected member of Clann na Talmhan, referred back to Blythe and company’s economies.
He said that in 1932 he had heard Fianna Fail deputies making ‘great propaganda’ out of this against the outgoing Government. They restored the shilling after their victory but in doing so they applied what was called a 'means test'.
Officials “ran around to every house in my county” he recalled, knocking on doors and asking ‘all sorts of questions’ including whether the pensioner had ‘any money in the post office, were the hens laying, how many pigs and cattle were there on the land’.
He wasn’t impressed. “Imagine any national Government here selecting the old age pensioners in order to start economies,” he raged. Those who did so, he concluded, “should be ashamed of themselves.”
Well! Things change, things recur.
The sudden collapse of public funds and the ensuing crisis reveal the hidden truths of the Celtic Tiger era. Things weren’t ever as good as they seemed. Cheap credit and construction and property hysteria blinded all but a few. There was scant preparation for the rainy day.
In most other European countries people can rely on effective systems for medical and social care and, even in old age, citizens live with a broadly comforting sense that they will be cared for if they are, or become, ill.
But we Irish live in a low tax free market dystopia. We have no such comfort. Quite the opposite, in fact. Every single Irish person fears ill-health because of the perception that being treated will make them more ill and that there is no guarantee that they will be appropriately cared for.
One accepts that this is unfair to most health and social care professionals. But perception is paramount in these matters and therefore things like medical cards assume iconic importance.
So, bearing in mind their knowledge of social history and their finely-honed political awareness of people’s perceptions, how did the Government get this so badly wrong?
Who knows? When the universal card was introduced someone did the sums and got them wrong. Bad at sums but good at politics.
And it may also be that the present policy in the civil service of appointing managers on merit rather than seniority is a factor. It’s the right approach – if you’re good enough you’re old enough – but it can mean that a lot of policy analysis and advice lacks any sense of history or possible political impact. Good at sums, perhaps, but bad at politics.
In addition, there is a very strong perception that the Celtic Tiger’s wagging tail has been supplanted by Ministers’ wagging fingers. Hang on, people say, you were the ones we put in charge. Why are you lecturing us?
Whatever, the storm has blown the fruit from the trees and no mistake. What’s probably most unnerving, to the Government as it should be to the rest of us, is that this is probably just the start. Fasten your seat belts...