by Violet on the Irish Budget of 6 October, a 1.3 billion euro income tax package and why an early-twentieth-century novelist would have found the punctuation familiar
Saturday 10 October, 10.05am, a desk with a view of a plane tree, a pot of Earl Grey and a small stack of paperbacks that I am pretending are research.
Dear Diary. I have been brought up to believe that a woman should have a room of her own, and a good newspaper, and the sense to read the second before the first. This morning I have the room, the paper and a Budget. The Irish Government announced Budget 2027 on Tuesday 6 October, and I have spent the week reading about it with the sort of attention I usually reserve for the middle chapters of a long novel.
What Was Announced
According to ITV News, published at 1.33pm on 6 October, Simon Harris, the Finance Minister, deputy premier and Fine Gael leader, began his Dail speech shortly after 1pm. Jack Chambers, the Public Expenditure Minister and Fianna Fail deputy leader, was due to follow him with further announcements. The report gives no total Budget 2027 figure. The only sum it states is a personal income tax package of 1.3 billion euro.
The measures it lists are as follows. The standard rate cut-off point rises by 2,500 euro to 46,500 euro, with proportionate increases for married couples and civil partners. The main tax credits, personal, employee and earned income, each rise by 125 euro. The home care tax credit rises by 100 euro. There are also increases to the state pension, reductions in childcare costs and cost-of-living measures, none of which has an amount in the report. It links the cost-of-living measures to concern over fuel prices, and notes that fuel-cost protests were held in several parts of the country earlier in the year.
The Language Of It
I do enjoy a Minister’s sentence. Mr Harris is quoted saying that the path we are setting out here today is an optimistic one for Ireland. He said the Budget sets the country on a path, a trajectory, a way forward. He said it balances today’s needs with tomorrow’s musts, and that people need to feel the benefits of economic growth in their own daily lives and indeed in their pockets.
That last phrase has the unmistakable rhythm of a man who has been told that the voters want to see their money. I do not say it to be unkind. It is a perfectly proper thing to want. But it does remind me that the best budget speeches, like the best prose, are the ones that say something concrete in the third sentence, and that the first two are usually the throat-clearing.
A Reader’s Notes
My own preference in Budget reading is to go straight to the numbers and ignore the adjectives. The numbers here are clear enough: a bigger band at the standard rate, a bump to the credits and a package of 1.3 billion euro for income tax. They tell you what a government is prepared to give back, and by omission what it is not. The report contains no opposition reaction, so I cannot tell you what the other benches said. I would imagine it was loud.
I have friends in both Dublin and London who treat their national Budgets as a kind of weather, in the sense that everyone talks about it and no one is quite sure who is responsible. I once wrote about the great British habit of fiscal concessions to the pub, in the post on tax breaks for pubs, the slippery slope, and the comparison is not entirely unfair. A Budget is a negotiation about who gets to be cheerful.
Two Capitals
I come at this as a woman who spends her time between London and Dublin, at least in imagination. My favourite piece of local colour on the subject is a short note on London and Dublin, which compares the two as if they were an old married couple who no longer share a bedroom. I also wrote about the diaspora in a piece on London’s Irish identity, with a pint and a history, which has since attracted more correspondence than anything I have written about novels.
There is a good deal of shared history between the two cities, much of it literary. The generation that wrote in the opening decades of the last century lived in a world where the border between Dublin and London was rather more porous than it is now. They moved, they quarrelled, they published in each other’s magazines and they borrowed each other’s jokes. I like to think of a modern Budget as a letter in that conversation.
What I Notice
A thing I notice about Irish budgets is the pleasure of the specific figure. Forty-six thousand five hundred. One hundred and twenty-five. One hundred. Those are numbers you can put on a fridge. British budgets tend to go for the larger, vaguer gesture, a billion here, a reform there. I am not saying the Irish approach is better, only that it is easier to quote at a dinner party.
I should say, as a matter of honesty, that I have not read the Budget documents in full. My source is a single news report, and I have tried to be careful to repeat only what it says. If you need the detail for a decision, please consult the Department of Finance or an adviser. I write diaries. I do not write tax returns.
Closing Entry
I write for prat.UK and for the occasional piece at Bohiney Magazine, whose readers in America are fond of asking whether the Irish budget is really as cheerful as the news makes out. I tell them it depends on the pint. For the long view on Irish humour, my page on Irish satire is a good place to start, and for a wry end to the day, NewsBiscuit is the best company I know. A second report, the Irish Times column of 22 September, explains why the pressure was so high, and I will take it up in my next entry.
The tea has gone cold and the plane tree is shedding its leaves with an air of finality. Goodnight, Diary. Read the numbers first, and the adjectives never.
SOURCE: bohiney.com
