What voters really want in the budget: value for OUR money

There was great craic to be had the other week, when Ireland became the unwitting victim of the biggest reverse robbery in history.

You know - when Apple Inc donned a mask, pointed a gun at Ireland’s head, and forced us to take €13bn of its hard-earned money. Oh, the ignominy of it!

After a call to Crimestoppers got us nowhere, it dawned on us that there was nothing for it but to keep this damned tax windfall. So we began to come up with ideas about what to spend that money on.

A north ring road for Cork, connecting the Apple HQ, was a fitting choice. Not so popular was a plea for an underground Metro up above (or down below) in Dublin. That crowd get everything from us!

A few politicians came up with ideas on spending it on water and energy infrastructure too.

But, entirely missing from this debate, was the valid point that we couldn’t plan to spend €13bn for the simple reason that our government are useless with money.

If we were told a job - say updating all our old and rusty water pipes - would cost us €13bn, then within a year, it would be costing us €15bn, a year later €18bn, and by the time the work was due to start, we would be lumbered with a bill of €20bn. And, as any adult knows, that is no way to run your finances, nor should it be a way to run a country.

The truth is, the most fiscally responsible way for our government to spend €13bn is to find a €5bn project, and assume that once the jigs and reels have stopped spinning, it will cost us €13bn after all.

That’s how bad we are.

Our government spends money like a drunken sailor. Trust it with €13bn? I wouldn’t trust it with my old penny jar.

Exhibit A: The much-mooted Cork events centre.

The Echo reported this month that initial state funding of €20m for this had ballooned to €50m, and then to €57m. That’s if it ever sees light of day, of course.

Exhibit B: The National Children’s Hospital in Dublin.

Originally slated to be open in 2020, the latest we have been told is it will be ready next spring. Which probably means autumn, 2025. What am I bid for spring, 2026?

Along with those delays have come an eye-watering spiralling of the costs. When the planning application was launched in 2015, we were told the hospital would cost €650m.

Naturally, inflation will nudge this up down the years - and an online calculator tells me that €650m in 2015 would translate to €792m today.

Hell, even by 2017, the estimated cost of the children’s hospital had soared to €983m. By 2023, it was at €1.73bn.

The most recent estimate is €2.24n.

What am I bid for ‘let’s call it €3bn’ by the time it opens?

Embarrassingly, It has been labelled one of the most expensive buildings in the world, but Health Minister Stephen Donnelly insists the new children’s hospital will actually provide value for money as its life span is expected to be twice as long as most hospitals, and it will be in use for a century.

It’s a flimsy enough defence, after all, none of us will be around to see if his prediction on the longevity of the building comes true.

Nobody can possibly deny that our Government collectively have proven to be very poor spenders of our hard-earned taxes. And they are our hard-earned taxes, entrusted to the Government to be spent wisely.

Now we have a budget coming on Tuesday, and all the talk, even before that Apple windfall, has been of a giveaway spree to the people ahead of an election.

Some extra cash in our pockets will indeed be welcome during what remains a cost-of-living crisis for many people - but I can’t help thinking that throwing the masses some shiny coins will act as a distraction from the wastefulness at the heart of our national finances.

A budget - next week’s will be unveiled by new Finance Minister Jack Chambers - is always a two-pronged instrument: a projection of the government’s planned revenues and expenditures for the year ahead.

Many of us understandably get caught up in the revenues side of a budget - what does it mean to me and my pocket? And when times are good, as they have been of late, this can make a budget a very happy event for the parties in power.

Taoiseach Simon Harris and Tánaiste Micheál Martin will be hoping for a pre-election boost on the back of the decisions made on revenue - cutting the USC, increasing social welfare payments, and the like.

However, what if we judged them on the expenditure side of the budget instead? I seriously doubt there would be any boost in the polls at all.

The Government may be awash with money, but it seems that throwing it at problems such as housing, crime, and health constantly fails to have the desired effect.

For instance, the HSE was allocated a budget of €23.5billion for 2024, which was 4.6% above the previous year’s allocation.

Have we seen value for that? Have hospital waiting lists been reduced? Have trolley numbers become a thing of the past? Pertinently, has anyone in Government even asked these questions ahead of the budget?

If allocating extra money to a problem in the public sector fails to resolve it, it makes you wonder whether the root of the problem is not money-related at all. Perhaps the system needs a shake-up, or a new approach instead.

When it comes to handing over money, our Government give the impression of being naive suckers, dishing out cash hand over fist and stumping up for everything, with no thought on whether we are getting value for money - bang for our buck.

The crazy sum spent on the bike shed at Leinster House is just another example of this. As was the astonishing revelation this week that we paid €1.4m for a security hut at Government Buildings.

Ireland Inc should be making hay while the sun shines, while our tax coffers are artificially inflated by bumper corporation taxes. We should be seeing signs of our extra money being pumped into all areas of society, but we rarely do.

Instead, the cash seems to vanish down black holes, and we are left with little or no improvement in our public services.

What will we be like when the tax take becomes tight again?

It’s time the public ceased being distracted by the baubles of giveaway budgets, and started demanding accountability from the Government for the way it spends our money.