Inside Politics:While the details of the Budget will remain a closely guarded secret until Wednesday week, one thing is already abundantly clear. Many of Fianna Fáil's key election promises will be abandoned without a backward glance and necessity will be portrayed as virtue.
It is an uncanny replay of 2002. Solemn promises given during the election campaign that no cutbacks were on the way were jettisoned immediately. In fact it emerged later that the Department of Finance was devising plans to rein in spending just as its political masters were saying the opposite in public.
This time around the rapid deterioration in the economic climate since the election will inevitably prompt the jettisoning of some of the most attractive giveaway aspects of the Fianna Fáil election manifesto. We won't know until Budget day what goodies are being abandoned to the waves, but abandoned some of them certainly will be.
Over the past few weeks the Minister for Finance, Brian Cowen, has managed to lower expectations about the Budget and few people expect him to deliver on the swath of election promises. In fact the Minister has done his job so well that people may feel a mighty sense of relief if the Budget turns out to be a little more benign than expected.
Still, it is worth recalling just what Fianna Fáil did promise back in May when the party manifesto was launched at a highly charged press conference in Dublin's Mansion House. That launch was dominated by Vincent Browne's interrogation of the Taoiseach about his personal finances and for a few days Fianna Fáil bemoaned the fact that the election debate was not focused on the economy.
However, by the final week of the campaign Cowen and other Fianna Fáil Ministers had managed to force the economy to the forefront of political debate. In fact the Fianna Fáil election victory was widely attributed to the fact that Cowen wrestled economic issues to the top of the political agenda instead of the Taoiseach's personal finances or the health service.
So what did Fianna Fáil promise? The key pledges as far as the average voter is concerned were to increase the tax bands and credits in line with wage inflation, to cut the top rate of tax by 1 per cent to 40 per cent and bottom rate by 2 per cent to 18 per cent, to cut PRSI contributions in half, to abolish the income ceiling for PRSI contributions, to abolish stamp duty for first-time buyers and to increase the old age pension to €300 a week by 2012.
These pledges were introduced with the claim "as part of our next steps forward we will . . ." followed by the promises under the various headings of finance and the economy or social affairs. However, when it came to drawing up the programme for government after the election victory, an important proviso entered the equation.
Under the heading "A Fair Tax System", the incoming three-party Government pledged to do the same things as outlined in the Fianna Fáil manifesto but it was hedged with the important qualification that "subject to the controlling economic and fiscal framework, the Government will implement the following specific approach to tax". It would now appear that the "controlling economic and fiscal framework" will not permit the top rate or the lower rate of tax to be cut and it certainly should not permit the very dubious notion of halving of PRSI payments to be entertained at all.
The other side of the coin, though, is that it will be no surprise if the revenue-raising exercise of lifting the income ceiling for PRSI contributions is abolished.
So instead of a reduction many workers will have to pay considerably more in PRSI.
The pledges that are likely to be honoured are the indexation of the tax credits and bands to help low- and middle-income earners and a move in the direction of increasing the State pension to €300 a week.
Cowen will probably argue that he will get around to honouring Fianna Fáil's election commitments if economic circumstances permit but, given the fiscal outlook for the next couple of years and the backdrop of a housing market slump, that may be out of the question.
Of course the only thing worse than a government that doesn't keep its election promises is one that does keep them when the money is not there to fund its ambitions. It is far preferable that Cowen should abandon the election manifesto rather than attempt to implement it and commit the nation to economic suicide in the process.
Although it is now 30 years ago, the lessons of Fianna Fáil's infamous 1977 election manifesto should never be forgotten.
That giveaway package involving the abolition of rates on houses, among other things, was predicated on wage restraint and a benign fiscal environment. Neither came to pass but the government pressed ahead with the giveaways nonetheless. The episode was the primary cause of the economic depression of the 1980s which ravaged the country at a time when the rest of the world enjoyed a boom.
So there is no arguing with the need to forget about cutting tax bands or PRSI rates in the current climate. The question, though, is why the proposals were ever seriously put forward in the first place.
The assumptions on which they were based were already tenuous by the time the election was called.
In hindsight the remarkable achievement of Fianna Fáil in the election was that it managed to create serious doubts in the minds of the voters about the pledges being made by the Opposition parties and, more importantly, their capacity to take over the reins of power. In the end that was what probably swung it for Bertie Ahern.
Yet, since coming back to power, the Fianna Fáil-led Government has made one mistake after another and it is becoming clearer by the day that its election manifesto was based on a false premise.