Welcome back, Bertie. Now that the boom keeps getting boomier and the property market is in full-on freak-out mode, it is time for our political leaders, as the great man famously put it, to “start throwing white elephants and red herrings at each other”. What with austerity and Brexit and the overhang of debt from the bank crash, Irish public life has been in penitential mode.
But the hairshirt makes a body itch with the kind of prickling irritation that can drive you mad. Just as some taxi drivers pine for the days when they could regale their passengers with descriptions of the apartments they were buying in Bulgaria or the Cape Verde Islands, some Government Ministers yearn for the days of wine and Bertie.
For those too young to remember and those whose therapists have ordered them to forget, the essence of Bertism is quite simple: find a group of people who turn out to vote in elections, get a cannon, load it with money and fire it in their general direction. As a principle of governance, it has two great advantages. It buys votes to keep you in power. And it relieves you of the burden of using that power seriously – all that tedious business of weighing costs and benefits and working out the greatest good for the greatest number. But for citizens, it has one minor disadvantage – it guarantees that even when the State’s coffers are flush, we will have grossly inadequate public services.
Vote-catching ideas
In itself Shane Ross's proposal that the State should give a €1,000 a year to every grandparent who minds a child for more than 10 hours a week is not worth wasting time on. It is obviously the result of watching the great scene in The Thick of It where the political advisers brainstorm new vote-catching ideas: "'Free apples!' 'Yes and ho!' 'Free coffins!' 'Yes and ho!'"
Somebody presumably showed this to the Minister for Transport and he mistook it for an instructional video: Free granny grants! Yes and ho! A pity Ross didn’t get to the end of the scene where the exasperated minister rails at all this “free-range, no-consequence bulls**t”.
It is an embarrassment for me to have to write in a national newspaper in 2018 in one of the richest countries in the world: we have not yet managed to create free primary education
It is perhaps worth noting, however, that in defending his own free-range no-consequence bulls**t, Ross thinks there is some mileage in Trumpian hysteria. In the Sunday Independent, anyone who asked basic questions such as what his scheme would cost or how 10 hours of childminding would be verified were subjected to all the insults that Trump has honed: elite, insiders, establishment. This Official Ireland (item one in the phoney populist catechism of cliche) is guilty of staggering "ingratitude to the older generation". These granny-bashers are clearly enemies of the people.
Free primary education!
So let me throw a far-out, blue-sky, outside-the-box idea into this brainstorming session: Free primary education! Is that a “Yes and ho!” I hear from the Government or just an embarrassed mutter? If it’s the latter it bloody well should be. It is an embarrassment for me to have to write in a national newspaper in 2018 in one of the richest countries in the world: we have not yet managed to create free primary education. And while we’re cringing, here’s something else that should make us squirm: real families in Ireland right now are going into debt just to send their kids to primary school. I nearly wrote that this is a disgrace to a wealthy country. But that’s wrong – it would be a disgrace to a poor country.
At almost the same time as Bertie Ross was flying his kite last week, the Irish League of Credit Unions and Barnardos produced their annual surveys on back-to-school costs. The ILCU finds that the average cost to a family to send a child to primary school this year is €999 – and that more than one family in every three has to go into debt to meet this cost.
Parents of primary school children are, on average, taking on debt of €367 – more than a quarter of them to moneylenders who charge interest rates of up to 188 per cent. Barnardos finds that 67 per cent of primary school parents have been asked for a “voluntary contribution”. If you want an example of the real elite, establishment thinking, it is the ability to ignore this reality for Irish families.
Genuinely free
So how much would it cost the exchequer to make primary education genuinely free? Barnardos has done the sums: €103 million a year. And how much would the “granny grant” cost? At least as much – and given the impossibility of policing it and the massive administrative cost probably much more. So here’s the point: if the State can afford the granny grant, it can afford genuinely free primary education – no voluntary contributions, free books, free transport. And for an extra €127 million a year, it could make secondary education free as well. The difference to families and children would be dramatic.
“Free” primary was enshrined in the 1937 Constitution; “free” secondary announced in 1967. Why are we still waiting? Because these are serious, responsible, long-term acts of nation building. They require a political culture that is intolerant of free-range, consequence-free bulls**t. It is always easier to ask WWBD? – what would Bertie do?