One hundred and fifty eight words. You can read them in about a minute, and in fact I heartily recommend that you do so, writes Fintan O'Toole.
They make up the entire debate on a measure introduced by Charlie McCreevy in his second last budget. It was a special tax break for the construction of private hospitals.
Its cost to the public purse is literally unknown but is estimated at around €63 million. All we the public were told is that it was "devised as a result of a meeting I held with certain constituents".
The outgoing Minister for Finance introduced it at the very last moment in the Finance Bill of 2003. After a brief, vague and singularly uninformative introduction of the measure by Charlie McCreevy, the entire scrutiny of this fiscal instrument consisted in those 158 words, most of them stunned interjections and unanswered questions.
Nothing illustrated the desultory quality of what often passes for political debate in Ireland than the discussion of Charlie McCreevy's legacy last week. Both his supporters and his detractors tended to agree on one thing: that he was a tough guy who kept strict control of the public finances. Some people thought this was a good thing, others that it was not, but almost everyone agreed that conservative stringency was his defining characteristic.
For anyone who bothered to look at his actual record, the image of Mr Prudent is risible. His characteristic mode was not the carefully controlled diet but the wild swings of the bulimic. One minute he was stuffing the system with cream cakes, the next with emetics. If we want to understand why vast amounts of public money have produced deeply dysfunctional systems of public provision, his mad gambler's approach to fiscal policy is the key.
Charlie McCreevy had a unique opportunity to make Ireland a better place. He had seven unbroken years as Minister for Finance and the immense good fortune to inherit a burgeoning boom from Ruairí Quinn. He was thus in a position to use unprecedented amounts of money in a consistent and coherent way to create a fair society in which everyone's basic needs - a decent health service, an education system in which no child would be left behind, a proper system of child care, an adequate level of affordable housing - would be met. His failure is a personal disgrace and a national tragedy, and the price is being paid by hundreds of thousands of people every day.
Deep down, Charlie McCreevy must have understood the depth of his failure because he was careful to have his excuses ready to hand. One was his essential mantra: "When I have the money, I spend it, when I don't have it, I don't spend it." It's the motto of the drunken sailor - lash the dosh around when you're on shore then bugger off back to sea so you don't have to listen to the complaints of the wife and kids. It ignored the basic job of a Minister for Finance - to ensure stability by easing public spending in a time of wild boom and increasing it in a time of relative bust.
The other, subtler, excuse was an implicit but nonetheless clear condemnation of his ministerial colleagues. He, McCreevy, had provided the money and if they couldn't produce the goods it was because they were not up to the job. This was a better excuse because it had an element of truth: some of his Government colleagues were indeed incompetent. But it hid a deeper truth - that much of the failure to turn spending into effective services was rooted in the splurge-and
-diet attitude of the Minister for Finance.
I often pass a perfect example of this near where I live: the beautiful new, world-class health centre in Ballymun in Dublin. It's a shining example of decency and equity. Except it's empty. If you're sick in Ballymun, you still have to go to the shambolic, overcrowded, miserable Third World health centre. Why? Because Charlie McCreevy pumped in the money for the new one when he felt like it and then abandoned it when he didn't. It is a perfect emblem of the McCreevy years.
They have been years of astonishing profligacy. Charlie McCreevy presided over a taxation system in which fewer than 27,000 taxpayers, including married couples, counted as one, claim to be earning over €100,000 a year. He lavished tax breaks on the wealthy, many of them not even costed. He sanctioned the disgraceful bail-out of the religious orders which, while protecting them from the financial consequences of decades of abuse, could cost the taxpayer a billion euro. He wasted huge sums on the abortive Bertie Bowl and on the fiasco of the Punchestown equestrian centre, a project which, according to the Comptroller and Auditor General, delivered virtually no public benefit. He came up with a demented decentralisation scheme that, if it is not abandoned, will transfer vast sums of public money into the hands of property developers.
If this is tight control of the public finances, Kildare will win this year's hurling All-Ireland.
What we need now is not a mockery of a debate about tightening or loosening the purse strings. It's a Minister for Finance with a serious and sustained commitment to raising money fairly, spending it wisely, delivering steady improvements in public services and making this a republic of equal citizens. That would sure make a change.