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Last night’s RTe 6.1 news got my dander* up with two reports that highlight the complicity of the media in our arrival at the current state of economic affairs. RTe’s Sean Whelan reported that the idea espoused by Olli Rehn that four year economic plans with targets should be the new normal for Ireland. This reports the idea itself as if a move to long term budgetary planning was somehow a new concept to Irish politics. Fact is Richard Bruton had outlined the idea in detail a good number of years ago long before the crisis of 2007/8 started in the context of shifting away from the song and dance of this big bang event of a budget day towards multi-annual budgets and a proper consultative process as part of a budgetary process. So given that RTe reported the commissioner as giving a strong endorsement to the government’s €6 billion deficit reduction target for this year, did RTe think to report that this support for multi year planning was a strong endorsement of FG policy and contrast it with the lack of action by FF when they had the chance to move towards it? Not a hope. I guess that this sort of idea is news to the folks at RTe and thus it is presented as radically new to the public who let’s face it aren’t expected to be policy wonks.
Add to this the sad fact that in the same bulletin Sharon Ní Bheoláin thinks that because FG agrees that a figure of around €6 billion needs to be the target for deficit reduction this year, and also agrees that the process of reaching the overall target of deficit reduction needs to be front-loaded and finally agrees with the longer term target of having deficit of 3% that there is nothing else to talk about and so they should just give up and vote for the government’s budget. As if those numbers alone were the be all and end all of the process and that the budget consisted of nothing more than two numbers of €6 Billion and 3% and a notion of front-loading. It is as if the details of how that €6 billion reduction will be arrived at were of no consequence, that how the reduction is to be divided in terms of tax increases or spending cuts is the stuff of nonsense, mere details of no concern to anyone.
It is part of the political narrative in Ireland that the details don’t matter that we should be focused only on some easy to understand targets. I have to wonder who writes those questions, who supports the presenters in the preparation and is thus actually in a position to say “Sure that’s a old of nonsense Sharon, ya need a better question than that to lead off with”. But given the obvious failure in the text on the telly prompter in recent months, asking for some back office support for news presenters might be asking too much.
We’re obsessed with targets in Ireland as if announcing a target makes it so. A few months ago the government was announcing some new strategy that would lead to 100,000s of jobs supposedly and what mattered according to the government was that they now had target, not the process not the how of realising it. As a mate said to me, he has a target of getting a job so is that his work done in that regard? Prior to this the failing supposedly of the FG newERA plan was meant to be that the target of 100,000 new jobs might be off or too rounded a number to be credible rather than the detail of how the jobs might be created. The media in their rush to be first in bringing us the report of the targets obviously don’t give themselves the time to read the detail.
This is part of the problem with the political situation in Ireland that much of the media give the appearance of doing next to no research and tend to have no background in paying attention to what is going on around them over the long to medium term. This leads to an organisation like RTe having a memory capacity that would embarrass the most dimwitted of goldfish.
Capping this was another report on the same RTe news program last night about penalties for landlords who don’t give people their rents back. That sort of thing has been announced about every 18 months to two years for a decade or so at this point but each time it’s treated as if it is new and is actually going to happen soon. At no stage was the junior minister Michael Finneran challenged on why the previous announcements about measures in this area had lead to nothing happening. Remember this is a report that legislation is being prepared, not that it is coming before the Oireachtas any time soon.
* I’m not 100% sure where my dander is located but it felt right funny all night.
