Fergus Finlay: My prediction? We’ll struggle to recall this thinly spread budget

And just to establish my impeccable credentials, this is what I wrote here on January 3 about the Rugby World Cup:

“It starts in September, it goes on for two months, and already I’m all of a tremble. We have to beat South Africa, Scotland, Tonga, and Romania to win our group. But that’s where it gets interesting. If we win the group, we probably have to beat New Zealand or France to progress. If we come second in our group, we have to beat (guess who) France or New Zealand to progress.” So far, so mission accomplished. I figured then that we’d have to beat England and South Africa again to win the whole thing. Now I reckon it will be Wales and France we’ll have to take on.

Assuming, of course, we beat New Zealand this coming weekend. Halfway through the match against South Africa, I came to the conclusion that this Irish team is a group that simply refuses to allow itself to be beaten. The first fifteen minutes of the Scottish match, when Scotland launched wave after wave of attack and Ireland refused to take a backward step, confirmed that view. We will beat New Zealand because this team will settle for nothing less.

So now you know. I’m an expert who never gets it wrong. (So now ye can sleep easy in your beds about the rest of the Rugby World Cup.) And on that basis, here are my two unique predictions about the event that will dominate every news bulletin and most tv and radio current affairs programmes for the next 48 hours. The single most important political event of the month.

Budget impact

First, if I ask you a week from now to outline the four main features of the budget, you’ll struggle to remember two of them. A month from now, you’ll have only the vaguest memory that there was even a budget.

And second, if, in a week or so’s time, there’s a major opinion poll measuring the impact of the budget, it will record more or less zero change. Confidence in the government will neither go up nor down. Confidence in the party leaders will stay the same. Voting intentions will not be changed one whit by the budget. Everything will stay within the famous margin of error.

This is slightly weird at one level. By the time they finish their speeches Michael McGrath and Paschal Donohoe will have disposed of billions of the country’s money. A billion isn’t a six or seven-figure sum — it’s a ten-figure sum. They’ll have moved some of it around, put some of it into your pockets in tax breaks, allocated some of it to trying to improve your quality of life in all sorts of ways, and invested some of it in all our futures.

And in a week or so you’ll all be saying “what was all that about now?”. It’s a massive thing they’re doing, for good or ill, and you’re going to be bored of it pretty quickly.

But at another level — in fact, at several other levels — there’s nothing weird about it all. Look for a second at the online edition of this august newspaper. Last time I looked there was a special section of the website devoted to the budget — accurately and modestly described as “Your home for unrivalled coverage of Budget 2024”. By my reckoning, it contained more than thirty articles — news and opinion pieces — setting out in meticulous detail what we can expect.

Unexpected twists

So there’s little or no possibility of a surprise. And budgets that are remembered — again, for better or worse — are those that contain the unexpected.

When Charlie Haughey announced free travel for the pensioners (God bless you forever Charlie!), it was by way of a throwaway remark in his 1967 budget speech, and nobody was expecting it. To the extent they even noticed it, it was dismissed by the opposition of the day as a poor old thing. Haughey made a bit more of a fuss about the artists’ tax exemption he introduced in his 1969 budget, but again it went unremarked by the opposition at the time (and cost so little that there was no point in including it in the published budget calculations).

But — perhaps because they were so unexpected — those measures caught the public imagination and cemented Haughey’s reputation forever (in some quarters, anyway).

Perhaps, though, the other reason politicians don’t like surprises in their budgets is that they don’t always play the way they played for Charlie Haughey. John Bruton’s VAT on children’s shoes; Charlie McCreevy’s decentralisation programme; Brian Lenihan’s austerity budget — when the surprises blow up in the minister’s face, the damage can be irreparable.

But there is another reason why all these billions are going to leave you so cold. It’s all just spread so thin, isn’t it?

In my lifetime there have been budgets remembered as election budgets, budgets remembered as austerity budgets, and budgets not really remembered at all. I’ve always longed to see a budget that would go down in history as “the education budget”, “the disability budget” or “the housing budget” but it’s never happened. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that some minister for finance would decide that there is one social issue so pressing, so debilitating in its consequences, that everything else is going to have to take second place for at least a year until we get this right.

But instead, as usual, it’s the “one for everybody in the audience” cliché that applies. A little bit for you, a little bit for him, a little bit for her. Everybody gets a little bit, nobody is satisfied, nobody remembers.

There is one final reason though why you won’t really remember this year’s budget. It’s because the government doesn’t really want you to. They don’t want to offend you, but they don’t want to impress the hell out of you either.

This is not, after all, an election year, and this is not an election budget. It’s the budget before the election year budget. Get it? Next year’s budget will have surprises, and it will have big stuff. Next year’s will be much more memorable because it’s the one they’ll want you to notice. Like that time — 2001, was it? — when Charlie McCreevy dramatically increased child benefit and made sure it was paid out with back money, days before a general election.

It will be something like that they have in mind for next year. So don’t feel guilty if you don’t much remember Tuesday afternoon’s budget. And here’s hoping it holds fine for them for next year.