The centre of gravity of debate on the Budget has switched back from the tax discrimination aspect to the issue of its overall inequity.
It was important that this should happen: there was a danger that the controversial issue of how not to tax spouses would totally obscure the perverse and regressive overall thrust of the Budget. It required the brusque initiative of Des Geraghty to re-focus attention on this broader issue.
However, the two issues of tax inequity and spouse taxation are linked, for the choice of a tax route to tackle the economic issue of spouses and work was not only politically inept and deeply divisive in our society, but was also regressive because of the way in which, like so much else in this Budget, it was calculated to benefit the well off. There are two distinct principles that I believe should be applied to this problem of parents working in or outside the home.
First, there is the issue of freeing spouses with children - which in the vast majority of cases means women - to make an unforced choice between working at home or working outside the home.
That decision should not be the subject of pressure from the State. The State ought not to seek to put financial pressure on women to enter the labour force in order to maximise economic growth - which is not, I repeat not, an end in itself, but merely a means to secure social objectives such as full employment and a better way of life for people.
Equally, the public authorities should not seek to impose moral or social pressure on mothers to stay at home and mind their children if their preference is to use their talents outside the home. The State should be neutral, not interventionist, on this issue. And, most important of all, in this as in the rest of its policies, it should act in a way that does not discriminate against the less well off, who should instead be favoured by its policies.
Second, the State, in its concern for the "children of the nation", also has a duty to ensure provision for and to safeguard children of spouses working outside the home by intervening to ensure the availability of childcare of a high standard.
By comparison with these two duties of the State, the issue of attracting more mothers into the labour force in order to maximise national output must, surely, take third place. That objective is, no doubt, important to the "social partners": employers want more workers and unions want more members, but in any healthy democracy these purely economic interests should never be allowed to dominate public policy. These two principles have been ignored or violated in this Budget by a Government that seems to have become so dominated by an absurd preoccupation with achieving economic growth for its own sake that it seems to have lost sight totally of the principles upon which public policies in this area ought to be based.
If we are to maximise women's choice - rather than seeking to tempt them to move in a particular direction for the benefit of "social partner" interest groups - the simplest way to do this is clearly by equitably supplementing the income of families with children.
If it were possible to do this in a manner that gave greatest help to less well off families, that would certainly be desirable. However, it may be the case that means-testing such assistance is too complex. And, if the alternative of taxing such financial transfers to parents is also administratively or politically difficult - for the reason that the direct aid given to such parents at present is paid to the mother, who under existing arrangements is often not separately taxed - then a flat payment to all families with children is clearly the next best solution.
In that event, the particular problems of less well off spouses working outside the home can be met by the State or local authorities providing them with free or subsidised childcare facilities.
What is clearly inequitable and morally unsustainable is to adopt a solution that gives bigger income additions to better-off than to less well off parents. And that means that tackling this problem through the tax system ought to be ruled out.
AS it happens, in the case of childcare we already have a ready-made means of providing non-discriminatory assistance to families with children - in the form of child benefit. Why, then, was this not made the channel for providing the assistance required in order to enable women with children to choose freely whether to care for their children at home or go out to work?
This Budget, in its amended form, has dedicated very substantial sums to tackling this problem by means of the inherently inequitable route of discriminatory tax bands. Now, if these sums had been applied to increasing child benefit, the increase in this benefit in the Budget could have been raised well above the actual measly addition of £8-£10 per month provided. Why was this not done? Why, instead, was the inequitable tax allowance route chosen? I believe that the answer to these questions is to be found in the fact that at the time of the last election this Government, clearly influenced by Charlie McCreevy, foolishly committed itself to limiting the annual increase in current public spending to 4 per cent a year in current money terms, i.e. 2 per cent or less in real terms.
Now simple arithmetic reveals that at our present growth rate this policy, if it were actually to be applied, would reduce the public spending share of GNP by a further seven percentage points over the lifetime of this Government, down to well under 30 per cent of GNP. But current public spending already absorbs a lower share of our GNP than in almost any other EU state - which helps to explain why people have to wait so long for hospital treatment and why some of our social services are so under-funded.
All this fiddling of the figures is to enable Charlie McCreevy to go on pretending that he has stuck to his 4% figure. But, far worse, Hanging on to this 4 per cent limit has child-care help to families inequitably through the tax system rather than equitably through substantial increases in child benefit. All because the same money deployed as child benefit would be regarded as an "undesirable" expenditure increase rather than a "desirable" tax cut.
It is, of course, the height of absurdity that this silly fiction should have prevented the Government from taking the sensible and equitable course of dealing with this childcare problem by means of an adequate child benefit increase rather than by a fatally flawed discriminatory tax provision.
The trouble is that by sticking to the fatally flawed structure of this Budget, and by patching it by the addition of £125 million here, and perhaps a further £125 million or more to secure trade union consent to a national agreement, the Government is producing a totally incoherent patchwork budgetary system that may be politically impossible for any future government to reform.
The only sensible way out at this stage would be for the Government to "stop digging", cancel the Budget, and start again without the ridiculous nominal 4 per cent current spending growth limit - even if that means another Minister for Finance. In the unlikely event of finding myself in such a mess, that is what, as Taoiseach, I would have felt bound to do.