Broken
promises and failed delivery are the start of a pattern
Do you remember that slogan?
You should t's no more than a few
months old, and it was backed up by one of the most extensive
advertising campaigns in the history of politics on this island.
What it really meant is beginning to come clear. We were the ones
who were done. And clearly, there's lots more of us to be done
yet.
In the Fianna Fail manifesto, published at the start of the
general election campaign, they outlined four key objectives for
the future. Apart from peace, they were:
to protect and expand
prosperity for all;
to achieve sustained progress on important
issues such as health, pensions and education and
to deliver more
effective and responsive public services.
Not content with outlining these key priorities, they went into
great specifics.
Prosperity would mean, among other things,
r
educed class sizes for the junior years in primary schools;
implementing their health strategy to permanently end waiting
lists and achieve a world-class health system for all;
ending
waiting lists for care services for people with disabilities, and
recruiting an extra 2,000 gardaí to tackle street crime and drugs.
It would also mean promoting diversity and tolerance. Where the
poorest of the world were concerned, FF's overall aim in
Government, they said, would be to complete their major expansion
of our development aid programme, achieving the UN target and, in
the process, becoming one of the top five aid donors in the world
by 2007.
Another of the specific promises made possible by our prosperity
was that Fianna Fáil in Government would follow through the
implementation of the 2000 Defence White Paper, designed fully to
equip our defence forces to meet peace-time challenges at home and
abroad.
These are all taken from the Fianna Fáil manifesto. One could
quote all sorts of similar promises from the PD document issued a
few days before the FF one.
What was intriguing about both of them
and reassuring to a large proportion of the electorate, as it
turned out was that these manifestos were issued by outgoing
parties of Government. In both cases, the message was the same and
it was defended energetically throughout the election campaign.
The message, carefully crafted, was this: "We're not like most
outgoing Governments, content to campaign on our record. Of
course, we've been very successful, but we also know there's still
a lot of work to be done.
"Because we're the Government, we know not only what needs to be
done, but also how it can be paid for. All these other parties
with their daft expensive promises can't be trusted. But we can,
because we've costed everything so well and so carefully."
Now, most of what appears in the first seven paragraphs could have
been put in quotation marks, because I took it word for word from
the Fianna Fáil manifesto. The couple of sentences that actually
do appear in quotes were never actually said in so many words.
They just informed every press conference, every photograph, every
interview, every speech, every press release issued by Fianna Fáil
during the campaign. I could dig out quotes for you, if you had
the patience to read them all, from John O'Donoghue, Micheál
Martin, Charlie McCreevy, Mary Harney and Bertie Ahern.
They were all members of the outgoing Government, and they are all
still there. They are all on record as saying that their promises,
both in general and in specifics, were realistic, and that
opposition criticism of them was just party politics.
It is, however, just as well that the couple of sentences I put in
quotation marks above weren't actually uttered. Do you know why?
Because they would have been a complete whopper, that's why.
The Fianna Fáil manifesto has probably notched up an all-time
record in this respect. It has happened in the past that political
parties have made promises that they were subsequently unable to
keep. Often those promises were made in good faith, but accession
to office established that the resources just weren't there.
But I've never seen a manifesto unravel with the speed that this
one has.
It is not only the fastest on record but this crowd never left
office.
The only conclusion one can draw is that they never meant anything
they said in the first place.
A week after the election, I wrote here that Fianna Fáil couldn't
afford its election promises, and that cutbacks would begin. And I
added: "Traditionally, whenever they have wanted to cut back, they
look around first (and only) at the programmes that can be cut at
the stroke of a pen.
And we all know what they are health, environment, disability
services, education. The old reliables in spending terms, the
areas where cuts can be effected overnight. Of course, the people
who will suffer are precisely the people who trusted Fianna Fáil
this time."
I got abusive letters for saying it, but it was right. Or rather,
I was wrong, because I forgot that the first place FF always look
is at overseas development aid. Before we make our own poor bear a
burden, we inflict one on people who can afford even less.
But the list of "stroke of a pen cuts" being implemented by Fianna
Fáil ministers gets longer by the day.
Look at these, all with a major impact on health care:
prescription charges increased by nearly a quarter; accident and
emergency charges up by nearly a third; the VHI to charge nearly a
fifth more all on top of 800 job cuts in health.
And on top of them, a major increase in education registration
fees; the promised 2,000 gardaí aren't going to materialise; ESB
prices are going to be allowed to shoot up; the helicopter
contract, considered an essential piece of modernisation, is to be
dropped, and, of course, nearly 40 million will be taken out of
aid to the Third World.
These cuts and that is what they are, make no mistake about it
have been described as "minor correctives" by some ministers.
They're nothing of the kind. They are the start of a pattern. The
one promise this Government doesn't want to break if it can help
it is the "read my lips" promise of no tax increases. Before they
do that, they will slash more and more out of public spending. As
always with Fianna Fáil and the PDs, the poor are basically voting
fodder. Promises made to them can broken at will after the
election. Promises made to the middle-classes are a different
matter.
