Sometimes, it's the little things that tell you most. If you want to understand the way power works in Ireland, one small provision in Brian Cowen's Budget last week was especially eloquent. On the face of it, it was a bit of good news: duty on credit cards is to be cut from €40 to €30 and on ATM and debit cards from €10 to €5, writes Fintan O'Toole
The twist in this blissful tale is that, to help pay for all of this, duty on cheques is to be doubled to 30 cent per cheque. The agenda is clear: the Government is using financial coercion to stop us using cheques and make us use credit and debit cards instead.
Who wants this to happen? Not the citizens. We like using cheques. In 2005, the most recent year for which I can find figures, we used 130 million cheques to make payments of €830 billion - a quarter of all transactions. In the market system that we're always being told to embrace, we the customers are exercising our choices.
Why on earth would it be the business of the Government to interfere with those choices? Why should a Government that declined to increase drink prices, in spite of pleas from so many experts and civic groups, target instead that well-known social scourge, the chequebook? Who decided that those who use cheques are the enemy and must be punished?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is the banks. Bankers don't like cheques. They cost much more than electronic transactions to process, and they are much less lucrative than credit cards. Our behaviour is, to the banks, entirely reprehensible and they want us to get with the programme and stop eating into their notoriously small profit margins.
Thus, for example, National Irish Bank's prebudget submission to Brian Cowen. It urged him to support "the phasing out of cheques, and the greater use of electronic forms of payment". This project "needs strong leadership from the Government to push through". (The phrase nicely hints at the degree of coercion that may be needed to make the recalcitrant populace behave properly.) It recommended: "The Government should levy tax on the inefficient forms of payment instead [ of] on the efficient forms." Brian Cowen, who managed to ignore budget submissions on behalf of children, the poor, carers and many others, responded by doing precisely what the banks asked. OK, so he hit them for a one-off €60 million levy but that does not change the fundamentals.
What he did not do was to state the full extent of the banks' agenda that he has agreed to "push through". The doubling of the tax on cheques is really just softening us up for the elimination of cheques altogether. There is an EU-wide programme called Sepa (the so-called Single Euro Payments Area project) to which Ireland has signed up, and its progress report states explicitly - and in wonderfully Orwellian language - that "cheques . . . will . . . ultimately disappear when it becomes clear to their users that other means of payment provide better service". The date for this disappearance is sooner than you might think: "By the end of 2010 . . . the use of cheques . . . is expected to follow a clear downward trend".
This agenda is swathed in the kind of absurd language that always tells you that your betters have decided what is good for you but realise that you are still too stupid to realise it.
The Irish arm of the project, the National Payments Implementation Programme, has the gorgeously fatuous mission of creating "a best of breed payments environment". Though given Cowen's impersonation of Pavlov's dogs in the way he responded to the banks, the dogshow metaphor may not be as inapt as it looks. But who is the best of breed payments environment best for? Those elderly people who are more vulnerable to exploitation by banks selling them credit cards at exorbitant interest rates and to scams and frauds? These questions aren't even asked. Nor is it mentioned that the shift to credit cards will be followed by more and more people acquiring levels of indebtedness that are hugely lucrative for the banks.
Most Irish credit-card holders do not know the rate of interest they are being charged, and 45 per cent do not pay off their balance in full each month. In theory, electronic payments are highly efficient and cost-effective (for the banks) but in practice they are, for huge numbers of consumers, financially inefficient and costly.
The point in all of this is not that it is necessarily a bad thing to move eventually to an electronic system of payments. But the Government's approach makes no effort to even consider the interests of the wider society beyond bank interests.
Large numbers of Irish people use cheques every day, not because they have to, but because they want to. They find this method of payment more convenient, more trustworthy, more personal, more within their own control. The customers are supposed to be always right, but the banks think they're wrong and only the banks matter. Democracy is supposed to be about checks and balances, but in this telling episode it's about no cheques and no balance.