The thing to know about tomorrow’s budget is that, like it or loathe it, you don’t have a choice. The Opposition cannot credibly outspend this Government and can’t afford to underbid it. In the absence of any broader vision, what we are getting is a great frittering of money for ever-less return. We are heading into a winter of loadsa money and a lot of discontent.

This budget will rival Gene Fitzgerald’s in January 1981 in its purposelessness – and that budget was until now a nadir of Irish budgets. Fitzgerald was finance minister in the throes of rising public debt, unemployment and inflation. Under then taoiseach Charles Haughey’s direction he ignored reality and kept spending in advance of an imminent general election, but it didn’t work. The circumstances now are very different but eerily similar. Modest but firm control of public spending, under a government with clear priorities and a willingness to articulate them, could be transformative. But it is not to be.

What we have in its place are bitty promises, a chaotic budgetary process that feels made up as it goes along, and fragmented politics. Much of the Cabinet and civil service are left to follow developments through the media. Inside the Government – insofar as there is any inside – there is a lot of feral scrapping for a share of a diminishing political centre. It is all short term and tactical. But even on the purely tactical front, it doesn’t work.

Because........

© The Irish Times