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“The Three Marys are in trouble”
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Mary Harney, Mary Coughlan, Maire Hoctor. That was one of the lines in the Dail this morning. Here is the Oireachtas record of the debate on the Order of Business. The Order is typically agreed in a couple of minutes but an unusually unified opposition turned into a scrum on the medical card for over 70s withdrawal, which looks set to join VAT on children’s shoes and a shilling off the old age pension in the icons of budgetary stringency. But there is a serious issue underneath. The medical cards for all was introduced under health legislation — it was never costed in a budget — and therefore has to be removed by health legislation. Mary Coughlan says that it will be done under a Social Welfare bill. Assuming that the government goes ahead with it (and I suspect they won’t), it will be the first truly tight vote for the extended Coalition.
If we have a proper media that paid any attention to the Oireachtas they would be all over the Tanaiste to explain this comment which appears to suggest the policy to extend the cards to all the over 70s was just plain wrong. Below is the text I’m referring to
“Can he (the leader of the opposition) justify a change by his members’ on the basis that a Government decision to offer medical cards to well-off pensioners, to senior civil servants, High Court judges, property tycoons, Ministers of State and hospital consultants has been condemned? Let the Opposition tell me where there is fairness and equity in that”
Indeed Tanaiste a measure you voted for was neither fair nor equitable. Did it even give her a moments pause when she campaigned for it in 2002 or was she solely concerned with getting herself reelected?Are there other policies that her government have implemented that she views in a similar light?
I think they’ve despatched Charlie McCreevy to a policy twilight zone whereby anything that “he did” (collective responsibility or Dail votes be damned) is not on their tab anymore.
2002 is one of those “what if” elections. (maybe they all are). But we’ve forgotten how delicate it was. The tech boom was clearly losing steam. There was a slowdown in the world economy after 9/11. The property bubble was only picking up steam. They needed a few rabbits out of the hat. The medical cards expansion was one of them.
Incidentally I’ve heard the analysis (which I can’t find a source for right now) that the expansion of medical card eligibility without any link to additional resources for the health service was a critical extra strain on the system.
There was another problem arising from the extension of medical cards to the over 70s caused by this Charlie McCreevy ‘back of the envelope’ populist style of Budget composition - the contributions by elderly persons to the cost of their upkeep and treatment in long term residential care.
An unforseen consequence of McCreevy’s medical cards extension policy measure was that it made those payments by persons in institutions entirely illegal. So the practice of taking their old age pensions books and using the pensions to pay for their care, which had always been a bit dubious anyway, was no longer sustainable. If any person over 70 years of age was entitled to free medical care because they were automatically entitled to a medical card then people living in long term institutions arguably were equally so entitled.
Various civil servants did try to point this out to Michael Martin at the time but he was too busy getting his name into the history books for bringing in the smoking ban - head lost in a cloud of smoke you might say - to pay any real attention to what he was being told. We all know what happened next - the State had to pay out by the million, even to the relatives of people already dead.
McCreevy’s other great ill-considered wheeze was decentralisation. And before that we had the €1bn giveaway on SSIA savings accounts.
Because the SSIA scheme worked so well politically and proved so popular I think the rest of the Cabinet viewed McCreevy as somehow infallible. Any spur of the moment madcap idea he came up with was viewed as somehow divinely inspired.
For a betting man, curiously there were times when he clearly couldn’t tell a winner from an also-ran. Or he was too lazy or too arrogant or so mesmerised by his own self-image as Ireland’s greatest economic genius of all time to commit his brilliant ideas to some cogent analysis before he announced them to the public.
As for the opposition - I don’t recall any of them questioning these policies in any fundamental way when they were announced. Certainly, none of them questioned the affordability of any such schemes or suggested that long-term they were not in the public interest. Far too pea-green with envy that they weren’t over there on the government side of the house announcing them to the greater electoral glory of their own parties and self-adulation. Remember free third level fees?
If there’s one silver lining to the present cloud it is this: it’s time we left our political adolescence behind us and grew up.
The genius of McCreevey’s wheezes was that they were so populist that politically you couldn’t object to them–turkeys voting for christmas springs to mind. Imagine an opposition TD objecting to a govt section coming to his local town , even though he knew it was never going to happen. Likewise , the SSIAs–money for nothing-how do you object to that and the current beauty, the med cards, I would guess the most popular wheeze of the lot. Another McCreevey wheeze was to pay the top civil servants so well that none of them would ever blow the whistle on what was going on or reveal the facts behind the wheezes,think benchmarking.
Turkeys have brains less than the size of a pea and don’t vote for anything. They are farmed soley for the purpose of being eaten at Christmas. Our politicians are supposed to have bigger brains and more character than turkeys, though you would really have to wonder sometimes.
I don’t think it’s entirely fair to blame civil servants for failing to curb the then Minister for Finance’s propensity to economic flights of fancy. We just don’t know what they advised and they are not allowed to comment publicly on government policies or what their advice to government is. We do know that many senior civil servants were appalled at the decentralisation decision and equally very concerned about the implications of the medical cards decision when it was announced. Benchmarking, incidentally, was designed and forced through by Bertie Ahern to buy off the public sector unions, not individual civil servants.
Personally, I believe that our civil servants are hardworking and conscientious individuals for the most part and have consistently shown great integrity in their service to the State. They can hardly be blamed for the introduction of doolally government schemes if they’re not allowed to properly scrutinise them and assess their implications in advance and if they only get to hear of them the day before they are announced.