Sir, – All due allowance should be made for the fact that more than a few Sinn Féin members of the Oireachtas are relative newcomers to constitutional politics. But they would do all of us a great service were they to come to the realisation that the Opposition is not duty bound to oppose everything.
Sinn Féin has an unusual problem. As an opposition party in Dublin it enjoys the luxury of opposing everything and promising the world. But Sinn Féin’s difficulty is that, while it is in Opposition in this State, it is in government 100 miles up the road.
In these unusual circumstances we can reasonably pay attention not to what they say they would do given the chance (which was tried in Venezuela without notable success) but rather to what they actually do in government on this small island.
Rarely are voters afforded such illuminating insights. It is virtually a controlled experiment.
The week before Budget 2021 was presented Sinn Féin said it would spend €5.3 billion more than the Government planned to in Budget 2021 and argued that “now is not the time for fiscal conservatism”. One might wonder who can be accused of fiscal conservatism (it was clearly intended as an accusation) at a time when as a country we were and are spending and borrowing at heroic levels. The answer is simple – in Sinn Féin’s book fiscal conservatism is the technical term used to describe whatever the Government is doing. And regardless of the level of public expenditure, Sinn Féin will always see its way to spending another €5 billion or so.
In Budget 2021 the Government announced spending plans very adjacent to the Sinn Féin number. But Sinn Féin couldn’t find a good word to say about these enormous expenditures.
The wind having been taken out of its sails, it scurried around looking for a criticism it could level against the Government. The best available was the accusation that the Government had failed to provide certainty.
Most commentators agree that certainty was a fairly elusive condition in circumstances where we had no visibility as to the timing or the efficacy of a widely- available Covid vaccine, when we were two months from the possibility of having customs duties and related formalities on the movement of goods to and from our enormous neighbouring market and when we had no certainty as to the stability of our €12 billion-plus corporation tax take. But Sinn Féin wanted certainty and the Government failed to provide it.
Included in the Budget was a support scheme which provided up to €5,000 per week to businesses which have to close or which suffer significant curtailment because of Covid restrictions.
Literally the following day Sinn Féin’s Finance Minister at Stormont, presumably with a view to providing the certainty championed by his colleagues in Dublin, announced supports for businesses in Northern Ireland which would have to close in light of the new restrictions there. Small businesses were promised about €880 per week and large businesses about €1,760. You really could not make this up.
Meanwhile Sinn Féin was strongly of opinion that the reduction in the pandemic unemployment payment from €350 to €300 in the Free State was unconscionable but that a payment of £100 was enough to provide certainty in the Six Counties.
Sinn Féin opposes the local property tax here (and proposed its abolition in its election manifesto last year) but presides in Belfast over a system of domestic rates. Northern Ireland, where Sinn Féin has been in government for a quarter of a century (with the occasional voluntary but paid absences), has high levels of poverty, low levels of educational attainment and very limited industrial development and private-sector employment in comparison with many other regions in the United Kingdom or indeed with this State.
All this is despite the annual cheque of the order of £10 billion from London. And, unless Boris delivers the promised land of milk and honey, which is looking increasingly unlikely, it is difficult to see things improving greatly in a post-Brexit Northern Ireland.
Time for those speaking on behalf of Sinn Féin to hold their whisht, methinks. – Yours, etc,
PAT O’BRIEN,
Rathmines,
Dublin 6.