Possible Political Repercussions of An Bord Snip Report

The release of the An Board Snip report has been met with anxiousness, hostility and surprisingly, in some cases, welcome. It seems that there is a surprisingly large agreement amongst the people that cuts in social welfare and public sector services are a necessary evil. This seems to be based solely on the media’s war on the public sector. Off course, this will change rapidly once the smaller, less covered aspects of the report are brought to the attention of the public. Aspects including the ending of community employment schemes, grading of job seekers benefit by age and increasing the drugs threshold. The implementation of these measures would once again return the elderly to the streets accompanied, undoubtedly, by many more, unions are already painting the placards warning they’ll be on the streets if certain things are implemented.

The government will have to consider the events of the last senior’s protest concerning medical cards and how badly it hit them in opinion polls before they take a serious look at the proposals on medical cards, social welfare and education. But because these cuts are coupled with so many more drastic expenditure cuts, it would possibly put Fianna Fail in the mid teens and the Greens on less than five points respectively. Of course, there’s also the curious timing on the release of this report with Leas Cross and the ERSI findings both also being published today. The fact they all, coincidentally, emegred at the same time will somewhat lessen what would have been their individual impacts.

This weekend the Green Party holds a special convention which will decide their future (if any) role in Government after the slaughter of their councillors in the June local elections. One must wonder what areas of Snip they’ll take a stand…

It also appears that history is repeating itself given that the proposal to cut 5% off all Social Welfare payments would be the equivalent of Blythe’s cut of the Shilling off the pension as of course there were 20 shillings in the old pound, or 5%. That cut, it can be argued, is what lead to the ultimate destruction of Cumann na nGaedhael. It remains to be seen if the debate around these cuts proposals will affect the Greens. If implemented, these decisions have the potential to destroy Fianna Fail and the Green Party in the near future.  There are already cries for the Dáil to be recalled to debate this, and I feel they will fall on deaf ears – the Government knows full well that while they are not sitting the people can’t yell at them. The Government will, over the coming months, remind the electorate that they are the ones making the difficult decisions. It is quite certain that, come election time, the electorate will reply with “Well we’ll make the easy one”.