Read My Lips:By attacking, Bertie Ahern sought to question Enda Kenny's ability to do his job, writes Fintan O'Toole
Last week's head-to-head debate between Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny involved an interesting role-reversal, with the incumbent Taoiseach going on the attack and the challenger forced to remain on the defensive.
The subtle message was that since Enda Kenny is now a real contender for the office of taoiseach, he had to prove that he is up to the job.
For the most part, the key claims were about two of the areas in which Fine Gael has sought to make the running: health and crime.
Two questions in particular focused not so much on the Government's record as on the credibility of Enda Kenny's proposals for the delivery of change.
The first prong of Bertie Ahern's assault on his rival's credibility was the question of the promise by Fine Gael and Labour to provide 2,300 extra acute hospital beds. He claimed that in their proposals they have provided money for only 500 beds, and questioned where the rest of the funding would come from.
Enda Kenny pointed to the €2.4 billion allocated to acute hospital development in the National Development Programme for the period 2007 to 2013. "I am going to reprioritise that and make that a priority provision for 2,300 beds."
Bertie Ahern in turn claimed that this meant that the other things that need to be done with that €2.4 billion could not be done.
"You're abandoning . . . what we wanted [ which] was the roll-out of Breastcheck, for cancer schemes . . . You cannot double-count. You're either using it for beds, or you're abandoning the other issues."
In other words, the €2.4 billion in the NDP is either/or money. If Fine Gael and Labour spend it on providing the beds, there will be none left to fund the capital investment needed for cancer services and the new national paediatric hospital.
There are, though, two obvious problems with the Taoiseach's claim. The first is that the NDP is actually very vague about the €2.4 billion it allocates to what it calls the "acute hospitals sub-programme".
It says the money is to fund "hospital infrastructure, including A&E units; acute hospital bed capacity; infection control standards of care and efficiency; location of private hospital facilities on public hospital sites to free up to 1,000 additional public hospital beds and maximise the potential use of public hospital sites. Major projects will also include the new National Children's Hospital in Dublin".
There is no cost breakdown given for these individual items. The truth is that nobody knows what any of the projects listed under this heading will cost, and therefore nobody can say whether the approximately €1.5 billion that would be left over after Fine Gael and Labour spend €850 million on the new beds, will be enough to fund them.
The second problem is that Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats have put no cost on the provision of public land and tax subsidies to build co-located private hospitals - the key part of their strategy to increase capacity in the public system.
So precisely the same criticism Bertie Ahern made of Enda Kenny's plans could be made of his own.
The second prong of the attack was Enda Kenny's much-trumpeted proposals to put 2,000 extra gardaí on the streets. The question here is what does the "extra" refer to. There are currently 13,178 gardaí. An increase of 2,000 would take the number to 15,178 - broadly in line with Fine Gael's promise to bring "the total strength of the force up to at least 15,000".
But Fine Gael does not dispute Bertie Ahern's claim in the debate that "by the end of the year, we will have achieved our 14,000 [ gardaí] between those who are out and qualified and those who are in Templemore".
Counting gardaí in training - and who are not therefore, in the words of the Fine Gael slogan "on the streets" - may be stretching the truth, and it is certainly the case that the outgoing Government has not reached its target of 2,000 extra gardaí in the lifetime of the last government. But Bertie Ahern's basic claim in the debate is not wrong.
In fact, Enda Kenny essentially accepted Bertie Ahern's claims when he said in the debate that Fine Gael and Labour had put €89 million in their costings "for the extra 1,000 gardaí which we will deliver".
He is thus acknowledging that provision has already been made to bring the numbers up to 14,000. In this sense, the Taoiseach is clearly right to suggest that Fine Gael's "2,000 more gardaí" really represents an increase of just 1,000 on the likely numbers at the end of 2007. All of these new gardaí are needed, in the words of Fine Gael's manifesto, to "deal with the crime epidemic currently sweeping Ireland".
Enda Kenny was clearly stretching things when he claimed in the debate that his justice spokesman Jim O'Keeffe "did not have the official statistics" with him when he accepted in a press conference that his claims of a doubling in crime were in fact unfounded.
This would be somewhat more credible had Jim O'Keeffe himself not told the Fine Gael ardfheis that his claims of a crime epidemic were "not based on stories and rumours, but on hard facts, on statistics produced by the Government and on reports from An Garda Síochána itself".
But in rightly pointing out that there is no epidemic, Bertie Ahern became somewhat over-enthusiastic, claiming that crimes per 1,000 people had dropped from 29 to 24. The CSO figure is a somewhat smaller drop from 26 in 2003 to 24.5 in 2006.
And it does raise a question: if Fine Gael is wrong to promise 15,000 gardaí to deal with the supposed epidemic, why are Fianna Fáil and the PDs promising 16,000 gardaí to deal with an epidemic they know does not exist?