by A flask of tea, a damp paperback and a budget that gives with one hand and sends a memo with the other.
DUBLIN, Ireland (The London Prat) – I am writing this in a hotel room with a kettle I do not trust and a window onto a bus lane, having crossed the Irish Sea with a flask of tea, a paperback I had no intention of finishing and the settled belief that a budget is a document written for people who have already decided how they feel about it.
Early morning: the platform and the flask
The train west left before the birds had finished arguing about it. I took the window seat, set the flask upright between my knees like a small silver chaperone, and opened the paperback, which is a long Edwardian novel in which three people spend four hundred pages not saying what they mean in a drawing room. It was the ideal preparation for reading Irish budget coverage.
Across the aisle a man was reading the same coverage on his phone with the expression of a person being told, by a friend, the price of a house he cannot buy. I did not speak to him. We are English. We communicated by sighing in the same key.
Mid-morning: the budget, at sea
The crossing was calm, which is the sea’s way of leaving you alone with your reading. The package, as the Irish Examiner’s account of the budget package sets it out, runs to 8.5 billion euro of tax cuts and extra spending. Welfare payments rise by 10 euro a week. The higher-rate tax threshold moves to 46,500. Childcare fees are capped at 550 a month. The help-to-buy grant goes up by 5,000, and the housing minister assures us this will not push up prices, which is the sort of sentence that ages in the cabinet like a cheese.
The opposition notices were excellent. Pearse Doherty called it a gone-before-you-get-it list, and Cian O’Callaghan of the Social Democrats called the whole package totally devoid of ambition. Either would make a respectable title for a novel from the early years of the last century, the sort with a frontispiece and a disappointed curate.
My favourite review, however, came from a pensioner quoted in the Irish Times budget live blog. The living alone allowance rose by 3 euro. He called it a joke. I have read the work of professional critics for thirty years and I have never seen a verdict so complete in so few words.
Late morning: a proposal that did not make it
Buried in the reporting was a floated idea of a 100 euro culture card for sixteen-year-olds. It did not pass. I took this personally, in the way one takes personally anything that involves books and teenagers.
- 100 euro buys, at a sensible shop, perhaps six paperbacks.
- Six paperbacks is a term’s reading for a determined sixteen-year-old.
- A determined sixteen-year-old is the only audience a literary culture has ever really had.
- Instead the money presumably went towards the 8.5 billion, where it will be of no cultural use whatever.
Afternoon: a small press near the quays
I had come to talk to an editor named Nuala, who runs a press out of two rooms and a cat. She makes beautiful books and is paid, as far as I can tell, in tea and the occasional grant. We discussed the novel I am pretending to finish. She asked me three questions about the structure and I answered none of them, which she said was the most promising sign she had seen all week.
Then, because nobody in Dublin can sit for ten minutes without the national broadcaster coming up, we discussed the RTE funding row. The budget cut RTE’s expected funding for next year from 260 million euro to 240 million, a 20 million reduction, according to the Irish Examiner’s report on the RTE funding row. The media minister, Patrick O’Donovan, said the cut reflected dissatisfaction with the pace of staff reductions. The director general, Kevin Bakhurst, met him and called the talks constructive. Asked whether the money would be restored, he said, “I don’t know. We’ll see.”
I have been trying for years to write a sentence that carries so much weight with so little furniture. “I don’t know. We’ll see.” The whole of the early twentieth-century English novel, with its hesitations and its tea trays, is contained in those six words, and it took a public broadcaster to say them out loud.
The same report notes that a senior government source thinks the gap could be closed by reforming the television licence. The paper adds that An Post collected 947,924 licences in 2022 and 768,657 by 2025. The Irish Times column on the budget and RTE puts the fall in licence sales at 6 per cent over the first nine months of the year. Nuala’s view was that people stopped paying when the television started to look like the thing it was describing. Mine was that the committee which has summoned both sides to the Dail will produce a transcript that is better than most of what I read on the boat.
Evening: the hotel and a headline I cannot shake
Back at the hotel I did what I always do when a day has been too full of numbers: I went looking for a different kind of numbers. A farming site carried a headline about a banker asking a bull for a heifer revenue timeline. I have not read past the headline, because I do not need to. It is the entire economic debate of two islands in nine words. Somebody with a spreadsheet wants a date by which the money will arrive, and somebody with no spreadsheet and a great deal of confidence has not got one.
I sent the line to the editors at Bohiney, who replied that it sounded like one of theirs. It is not. It is a real headline, which is precisely the problem, and why I keep a UK checklist for telling headlines from nonsense pinned above the desk. I have had to consult it three times this week.
The kettle has now boiled, against my expectations. I will drink the tea and take it as a sign. The British Onion would have run the budget under a headline of a single word, and the word would have been “Sorry”.
Tomorrow I take the ferry home with a manuscript no longer than it was and an invitation to come back for a reading in the spring. If you want more of my notes from the road, there are more of my daily notes at The London Prat, where the budget is always balanced and nobody has ever been asked for a timeline.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
