Elbows out at Cabinet?
Au contraire.
Reports of Government Ministers at loggerheads with each other as they battle for bigger slices of this year’s budget pie were brushed aside by the Minister for Justice in the Dáil on Wednesday.
Hardly any blood on the carpet, apparently.
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Jim O’Callaghan is good at minimising these type of allegations.
“I feel safe walking into the Cabinet room at any hour of the day or night,” said the 6ft 5in former rugby player.
Oh, wait. Didn’t he say that a few weeks ago about worrying incidences of antisocial behaviour in Dublin city centre? It’s easy to get these things mixed up.
[ Ministers in fraught negotiations over tightest budget in yearsOpens in new window ]
Anyway, following leaks about vicious turf wars between senior Ministers during the budget allocation carve-up, Big Jim moved to dispel any notion that his colleagues are taking lumps out of each other behind closed doors during negotiations.
Or that, the Minister for Public Expenditure, Jack Chambers of Commerce, is being excessively mean to them and the Minister for Finance, butter-wouldn’t-melt Paschal Donohoe, is aggressively egging him on.
On Wednesday morning, our political team reported with typical restraint that the negotiations are “fraught” and “Ministers across several departments have clashed” with Chambers and his department “over the tightest budget for years”.
We hear the few Civil Service mandarins who don’t hate each other are walking around in pairs, at least two advisers are under house arrest and senior Ministers now have to use the same plastic cutlery at teatime as the Ministers of State in the high chairs.
“The perception that somehow Government Buildings is unsafe for Cabinet members and gurgling junior ministers is not borne out by the statistics. Of course – and I speak as a proud member of the Fianna Fáil party here, high-level politics is always going to have its fair share of bowsies acting the maggot, but in my view, Cabinet meetings have never been safer than they are now,” said Jim.
Apologies. We are mixing up our danger zone replies again. That one might be from August, after a violent incident in Temple Bar and not Jim’s response to the allegations of ongoing altercations in Merrion Street.
In the Dáil, he was standing in again for his Taoiseach and party leader, who was in Copenhagen at a meeting of EU leaders.
This could be because he is proving a good performer at Leader’s Questions or because Micheál Martin’s choice for this week was hors de combat, amid rumours he was struck over the head with a gross expenditure envelope at the most recent round of negotiations.
Holly Cairns, the leader of the Social Democrats, was concerned by what she was hearing from behind the scenes in Cabinet.
“Less than a week to go before the budget is announced and it’s apparently ‘elbows out’ at the Cabinet table, or so that’s what the papers are reporting,” she remarked during Leaders’ Questions, noting that people are being led to believe “battles” are raging between Ministers trying to secure money for the departments.
“You’d swear that this was a Government that made every single penny count,” she said scornfully, before following in the footsteps of Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald with a litany of examples of the “enormous levels of waste across Government and public bodies” as highlighted in Tuesday’s report from the Comptroller and Auditor General.
“No controls. No oversight. No accountability.”
Despite the Government having so much money to spend, she doesn’t have much faith in the forthcoming budget improving the lives of people struggling to make ends meet.
“If the leaks are anything to go by, this will be an uninspiring budget that just tinkers around the edges.”
Where is the ambition? Where are the radical measures that could make a real difference? “Where are the big ideas?”
But worry not.
“Minister, this afternoon, the Social Democrats will be announcing our alternative budget to show people that there is another way to drive down costs for families and target money wisely.”
Senior Counsel Jim wanted to get the evidence straight at the outset.
“The first thing I will say is I haven’t noticed any elbows out at Cabinet when it comes to the budget negotiations.”
That’s not a sensible thing to be doing under the nose of an officer of the court and the Minister for Justice.
That would be like somebody in charge of regulating the operation of drones flying in Irish airspace sending up drones to video his election campaign in contravention of those same rules.
Stupid. There is an important difference between being licensed to drone and being licensed to drone on.
Jim O’Callaghan also wanted to make excuses for colleagues in the unlikely event of them fighting like rats in a bag over budget allocations. “In fairness to each Minister, their objective is to try to ensure they can get sufficient resources to fund their Department for the year ahead.”
Sure none of us is perfect.
“In my area of Justice, it is something I am seeking to do, but I also have to be conscious and responsible that we need to keep restraint on public spending.”
Was that blood on his knuckles?
All this talk of restraint might have something to do with the fact the Government went mad before the last election, introducing a budget which was “a giveaway on steroids”, said Holly.
Jim reached for the standard answer relied upon by all his colleagues whenever last year’s budget, with its raft of one-off payments, is used as a stick to beat the Government: “I don’t remember anyone in the Opposition complaining.”
He welcomed the publication of her party’s alternative budget and had no doubt that Paschal Donohoe and Jack Chambers “will give careful consideration to it”.
They’ll have a lot on their plates, so.
Sinn Féin, Labour and the Greens are publishing their alternative budgets on Thursday. They’ll have to pretend to give them careful consideration too.
The budget is next Tuesday. Blanket coverage of the presidential election is probably to blame, but the run up to it this year has been unusually quiet.
Except within the merciless confines of the Mixed ministerial Arts octagon in Government Buildings, where the Government is anxious for everyone to know handbags are in full swing and hard-fought concessions will not be conceded lightly.
It’s called expectation management.
