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Much like the town drunk buying drinks for everyone in the bar in an attempt to redeem his failing reputation, the recent budget saw Ireland’s ruling political class once again splashing the cash in the vain hope of buying popularity with the Irish electorate.
The sheer size of that war chest – much of it corporations tax receipts -is shown by the fact that Ireland’s politicians are planning to spend about €87,000,000,000 over the next year. What seems to make a lot of their spending decisions that much easier is the knowledge that they are spending other people’s money rather than their own. No wonder the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (IFAC), the body charged with overseeing Ireland’s fiscal health, has started to cough nervously at the behaviour of the FF/FG/Green coalition government.
The Irish government is now, by far, the biggest spender in town. Its spending decisions can result in a tsunami of money suddenly flooding a particular area. Equally, the legislative and regulatory reach of the state can fundamentally re-order how citizens live their lives. The other part of that equation, of course, is that these state interventions can have unintended consequences and even at times, end up producing contrary outcomes to those intended by the state in the first place.
But back to the money. If you want an example of just how reckless Irish politicians can be with other people’s money then look no further than the fiasco that was and is the National Children’s Hospital. Having started with a budget of €650m on receipt of planning permission in 2016, the budget is now expected to exceed the €2bn mark. To put that in context, that’s like someone intending to buy a €650,000 house ending up paying over €2m for the same house.
No amount of carefully crafted ‘lessons will be learned’ PR statements can hide the simple fact that Ireland’s political class are utterly incompetent when it comes to delivering large scale infrastructural projects. Neither can they be trusted when it comes to talking up the increased role of the state in the lives of citizens.
Surely, the ongoing housing crisis is proof positive of that. Calls for the government to intervene and fix the housing crisis, far from helping things, have only made things worse. What the cheerleaders for greater state interference in the rental market rarely mention is that since the introduction of Rent Pressure Zones and rent controls in 2018, the number of properties available for rent has actually fallen. It’s now the law of supply and demand which is causing rents to rocket and the only thing the state has managed to do is help to suppress the supply of places to rent.
Despite this, there is no end to the calls for the government to interfere even more although there isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest that the existing interventions have done anything apart from make matters worse for renters.
This would be an obvious point for any political opposition but the problem in Ireland now appears to be that there is no opposition or certainly none with opposing views to the government. Sinn Féin are proposing even more state intervention in all aspects of the housing market although the National Children’s Hospital fiasco should serve as a chilling reminder to all that clever-sounding ideas involving state building companies and the like are little more than a Marxist fool’s gold.
We already have ample evidence of what a state-centred housing solution might look like. Take Dublin City Council and its social housing as an example – it now has arrears of over €38m on below market rents pegged at 15% of income. If a planned below market rent model isn’t viable then how can even a cost neutral one with higher rents possibly be viable?
No one is saying that social housing shouldn’t exist but such a model will never be a viable solution on the scale proposed by those on the left. Indeed, a recent report noted that 42% of all new houses are now purchased either by the state directly for social housing or by approved housing bodies (AHBs) with state funding. In effect, this now means that an ordinary worker in Ireland is not only competing with the state in their attempts to provide their own housing but also funding that competition.
And still the frenetic Big State over reach and interference continues apace. We now have ministers who are supposedly in charge of five or six separate areas within their ministerial portfolio. Many of the things they are supposedly in charge of are not even remotely fixable by them in the first place but that does not stop them pretending to all and sundry that they can do the impossible.
One result of this over reach has been the utter neglect of the core functions that any state should be focused on such as health care, housing policy, law and order, education, enforcement of border controls etc. Another one of those neglected core functions is defence. Ireland is now possibly one of the few countries on the planet not to have a full-time minister for defence and the shambles that is our defence forces is proof positive of that neglect. Mind you, that doesn’t stop Ireland’s political class from strutting the world stage pretending to be the global leaders that everyone knows they are not.
Ireland’s political class are failing utterly to manage the core functions of a sovereign state. Instead, much like demented spinning dervishes we have the spectacle of second rate political players pretending to be doing things that they clearly are not able to do and shouldn’t even be attempting to do in the first place.
The most remarkable thing about today’s Big State in Ireland is not that it is a leftist vision of how a country should be run but that the parties now slavishly implementing a failed template were once seen as parties of the right.
Big State Ireland is now viewed as a mainstream political view rather than the extremist ideology that it really is. It makes you wonder just how much more of a failure of basic services Irish people will have to endure before that changes.
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