Date Published: 11-Nov-2009

A hunk of the ‘alternative government’ was in Galway on Monday as FG Leader Enda Kenny and his finance team brought west their determinedly upbeat outlook – the government may well be preoccupied with NAMA, but they had chosen a message built around getting people back to work.

Their new superstar George Lee TD – and the word is that they might be looking for someone like him to adorn the ticket in Galway West in a bid to win a second seat – spelled out the state we were in all right, as did Deputy Leader Richard Bruton.

Finance Spokesman Bruton said we had blown our competitiveness in a series of ruinous years when the government felt its role was not to govern, but to appease and buy out problems. He said a real opportunity for reform in the public service had been lost.

‘Working Together’ is the theme of this FG session going around the country meeting business people and asking them about problems and solutions. In other words, while NAMA and talks on cuts in Child Allowance and public sector wages grind onwards, Fine Gael has occupied the ‘recovery ground’ – which centres on getting some of those 400,000-plus unemployed people back to work as the means of firing the recovery and getting the tax revenues back on course.

For instance, at the weekend, Enda Kenny was on RTE Radio One with Marian Finucane and very firmly stitched into the record that FG would not support one of the government’s apparent prime targets, a cut in child welfare.

He saw it as a vital source of income to many families …… perhaps some of them on the brink. Maybe he is right in thinking that the days may be gone when ‘Children’s Allowance’ was used for incidentals like buying shoes for the First Communion. It could now be bridging the new gap that has arisen in many households in paying the mortgage – because of ‘short time’ on a job, or a spouse losing a job in a family that two years ago thought they would never see a hard day again.

It could also be paying for child-minding. And it is hardly a coincidence that Minister Mary Hanafin, two days after Kenny’s radio unequivocal commitment on Child Welfare, is talking of a less ‘blunt instrument’ than Child Welfare cuts across the board, with mechanisms such as ‘banding’ among income groups, being discussed in interviews.

But, if this is a clever Fine Gael campaign to get a chunk of the ‘Alternative Cabinet’ out and around the country, and concentrate on anything but spending cuts and tax increases, there were moments on Monday when it genuinely struck a chord – like the plea from small businesses which are ‘on the floor’ because the backside has fallen out of the demand and the consumer confidence which drove the retail trade before the economy ‘fell off the cliff.’

The small shops in trouble and hurting badly aren’t the huge closures with hundreds of people laid-off and television cameras all about …. these are the quiet, desperate little closures of shops and family businesses in Galway towns. Many have less than a handful working in them.

These are the jobs that might never be replaced and are marked only by a notice in the family shop window saying bleakly ‘closing down sale,’ and a name over a door disappearing out of the history of a town’s main street.

There was palpable empathy when some of the businesses told the Galway FG conference about how they are hurting, how they are having to let people go, how they have lost out since those euro millions fled over the border in shopping trips, how rents keep on increasing, how Rates keep on increasing. Leo Varadkar TD and Kieran O’Donnell TD had a promise for them of Commercial Rates being frozen for three years …. but sooner or later the issue of financing these concessions will also come to bear.

Enda Kenny himself had examples, he said, of nine or ten business people who had come to him to say they were being ‘screwed to the wall by the banks.’

A farmers’ representative told of banks simply refusing finance for re-stocking, a move which effectively means a family farm cannot function because it is being refused working capital that was always provided. In the case of the faltering and barely surviving retail trade, the basic plea at the FG conference was for someone to come up a means of injecting enough confidence into the country for people to ‘open their purses or wallets’ and begin to spend again. These are the ones who are hoping that the Christmas trade might tide them over, but who fear a bleak New Year.

Another major theme of the session, which was attended by about 200 people, was reform in whole areas of the economy and a regaining of our competitive position. Some were bitter that ‘social partnership’ had led to unreal wages because in many cases, private industry and business just weren’t represented as deals were being struck and benchmarking was being conceded.

From the education area, we were told that there had been no investment programme in the IT sector since IT 2000, and there was palpable anger at millions spent over long years, on renting and erecting prefab classrooms.

But the mood was determinedly upbeat – perhaps most so when it came to the issue of health services, where Enda Kenny has firmly linked the party to a solution based on the Dutch health system where, he said, services were delivered and there was value for money and hospital queues didn’t exist. He said he had been in a 450-bed hospital in The Hague where queues of patients simply did not exist. Once there were more than five or six people waiting, an extra triage nurse came on and people were dealt with. It was unusual, he said, to wait more than ten minutes.

Kenny told a representative of patients that for an average of €3,500 per year per head of population, the Dutch were able to deliver a health system that worked and was efficient. We could not match it with expenditure of €5,000 per annum, but the Dutch could provide a system which worked for a population of 17millions.

He said that, under a Fine Gael government, difficulties like access for all in a reasonable time, would be guaranteed. He drew laughter from the attendance in the Menlo Park Hotel when he said that, in the hospital in The Hague, there were even public relations people who invited you to come inside and see how well the health system was operating. He would not like to think of what visitors might think of some of the things which went on in Irish hospitals.