Lorraine Courtney: The Coalition row over tax cuts ignores one crucial fact, we pay the bills and should have a say

Opinion by Lorraine Courtney • 12h ago

MARKETS TODAY

What do you want the Government to spend your money on this year? It is, after all, the money you hand over via eyewatering PAYE, PRSI and USC deductions from your monthly pay packet. You think you have some skin in the game? No. Not according to Micheál.

The Tánaiste accused three Fine Gael junior ministers of undermining the budgetary process, saying a recent newspaper article in independent.ie by the ministers of state where they called for a budget tax break of €1,000 for workers was “unhelpful”.

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Last Monday, Fine Gael junior ministers Peter Burke, Martin Heydon and Jennifer Carroll MacNeill wrote an op-ed outliving their budgetary demands. The main one was for a €1,000 tax break for those earning €52,000 a year and under. “Ministers of State writing op-eds is not helpful, it undermines this process,” Martin told a Fianna Fáil meeting, saying he would “insist” that Minister for Finance Michael McGrath is “given the space” to carry out this work

But hang on. Isn’t this our money we’re talking about here? Because what Mr Martin seems to be saying is that even if you’ve paid heavily into the system in the past year, it needs Michael McGrath, alone and without pesky interruptions from public opinion, to decide what we care about and want our money spent on.

It’s a very sad day for Irish politics when openly talking about possible budgetary options is being dismissed as undermining the budgetary process. Can you believe that some people have the nerve to suggest that taxpayers should have a say in how their hard-earned money is spent? Why should we trust the public, with their inconvenient opinions, to have any influence over the allocation of funds? After all, what could be more democratic than a bunch of elites huddling together behind closed doors, making decisions on our behalf? When we do our grocery shop or get an electricity bill, we are handed an itemised receipt. But our single biggest monthly payment is to Revenue. We were kept in the dark for too long about where exactly these tax euros were going. Now credit where credit’s due.

The excellent Where Your Money Goes tracker allows us taxpayers to quickly see the various sectors that make up the €103.5bn of this year’s government expenditure. There are dedicated summaries, graphs and interactive charts for the past decade. And solid information about how the Government spends our money helps us choose our Government.

Where the site falls down is that we really need information about the performance of our public services too. I want to know more than that X Government department paid a cheque to “health” – this year’s cheque was a whopper – a cool €24bn. I want to know what exactly this achieved. For too long, this information has been buried deep in Department of Finance spreadsheets, cloaked by the technical language of bureaucrats, out of sight of taxpayers and voters.

This autumn’s budget matters to every one of us. I can’t speak for the entire electorate but as one person, I see the uncertainty, the anxiety, and the perpetual struggle to make ends meet. I see a country that has elevated the cost of living to unprecedented heights. 2023 has been like playing an intense game of Monopoly, and we’re all just pawns, happily trading our properties for a chance to survive.

Never mind a global pandemic, the past year has been an interesting experiment in human endurance. Just this week Barnardo’s told us that the high costs of food and energy are putting huge strain on families and shockingly, almost three out of every four children negatively affected. Two-thirds of parents said that they had cut back on their children’s social activities.

One poignant case study described how one mother and her son have been going to bed at 7pm to save on heat and lights. The mom uses her mobile phone to light the house when her son is asleep.

We’re breaking our own records. Homelessness figures pass 12,000 for the first time, including nearly 4,000 children. Consumer price inflation was running at 7.2pc in April.

So, tell me again who needs a say in the budget when we can bask in the excitement of never knowing whether we’ll be able to afford our next meal or pay our rent?

Now, instead of listening with any kind of humility after the rolling binfire of the past winter, politicians seem to be shutting down discussions. We need more, not less, debate about how our money will be spent and allocated in this year’s budget.

Sadly, I expect much more of this. A few months out from the budget, we still have a summer of politicians telling us what we can and cannot know about. After all, who needs financial security and peace of mind when we can have the exhilarating experience of never knowing if we’ll be able to afford necessities? Life’s a rollercoaster as they say. Be happy with you lot Joe Public and just leave the budgetary influence to the lobbyists and special interest groups instead.