Sacred Cows

So now that the Government has got over the Lisbon vote and the Green Party conference on NAMA, it has only the budget hurdle to jump in order to live out the year. This should be a cinch, what with all the softening-up that has been done since the credit crunch hit and our solvency went down the tubes. However, the renewed talk from Government Buildings of 'social partnership' and programmes of recovery, shows Cowen and Co' running for the comfort blanket again.

We can take it for granted that if Cowen, Coughlan and the rest of the fainthearts in Fianna Fail get their wish and SIPTU et al are calling the shots, there will be no more talk of radical public sector reform and pay cuts. Instead, all the talk will be of new taxes and charges to protect the 'vulnerable' and 'workers'.

Apart from topedoing any chance we had of finding our own way out of fiscal disaster (instead of having it dictated from Frankfurt or Geneva), it will also mean a long overdue examination of massive benefit spending by the authorities will never take place, once again shortchanging the taxpayer who funds the whole thing. This is a pity, because some of the inconsistencies are now so obvious the Government could justly be accused of organised theft.

I know it's not popular to talk about it, but the issue of single-parent allowance falls into this category. It now costs over €1 billion a year to pay this benefit - about 50% of what we pay in child allowance to every young family in the State. That figure alone is staggering. However, it beggars belief that every one of the people drawing this allowance could not survive without it, and yet that is the argument that our authorities are happy to stand over. That is simply not acceptable, yet our political and administrative elites accept it without question.

That genuine radical, Margaret Thatcher, faced a similar paybill when she came to power in 1979, but instead of wringing her hands and ignoring a political hot potato, like her predecessors in No.10 and our own 'leaders', she just refused to put-up with an obvious misapplication of public money. Being a woman, she wasn't afraid to say the truth - that a big percentage of single mothers were actually living with the fathers of their children, but were allowing the taxpayer to subsidise their living arrangements instead of getting the father to pay for his own child. Her answer? To set up the Chid Support Agency, whose mission was to track down these "deadbeat dads" as the Americans call them, and get them to take responsibility for their own actions. The PC brigade howled, but it worked.

How many questions have been asked in the Dail about progress in making the missing fathers of single-parent children support them? What action has been taken by the Department of Social and Family Affairs to put the burden of raising a family back where it belongs - ie, the parents? The answer? In both cases, none!

So now you know why this tiny state is shelling out a billion euros on a totally preventable problem, and why the soon-to-be-reconvened social partnership will be raising taxes to pay for it. Because nobody in power in Ireland gives a damn about you, the taxpayer, and even if you've never had a child, you must pay in place of the man who did. Is that fair? Brian Cowen, Eamon Gilmore and Enda Kenny think it is.