As you’re probably aware, today is budget day, the annual piece of ritualised theatre that still manages, despite everything, to command the undivided attention of the political class and the media. By midafternoon, the familiar tableaux will have unfolded: the briefcase (or laptop) held aloft for the cameras, the careful walk into Leinster House, the set-piece speeches, the quick-fire hot takes, and the evening news bulletins topped and tailed with the same talking points.
But despite the best efforts of all concerned, the truth is that the spectacle is losing much of its grip. The budget remains important, of course, but its place as the single great national drama of the political year is less secure than it once was.
Not every country does it this way. Germany, France and the US are among the many who feel no need for a single day of budgetary reckoning. States with strong presidential powers, or with dispersed federal ones, tend to have a more low-key rolling set of announcements throughout the year.
The roots of the spectacle as we know it lie across the Irish Sea. In the 19th century, the parliament at Westminster made control of taxation the decisive test of democratic authority. Chancellors turned the annual presentation of the accounts into an opportunity not just to present a balance sheet but to make a moral argument: who should pay, who should benefit, what kind of country the government wanted to build.
William Gladstone made an art form of it, delivering speeches that lasted hours and were treated as civic sermons as much as financial statements. From that mixture of procedure and performance grew the conventions we still live with today.
Independent Ireland inherited the ritual, and though the early decades offered little room for dramatic gestures, the format stuck. By the 1960s, budget day was one of the few guaranteed news events of the year. In a small country with a narrow tax base, the changes mattered directly. A penny on the pint, a rise in cigarette duty, a tweak to allowances: these weren’t abstract policy questions, they were felt in every household by the weekend.
The media learned quickly how to frame the story. Newspapers had an old, reliable formula: winners and losers. Scarcity helped too. There were relatively few national rituals that united the attention of politicians, journalists and the public at the same moment. General elections were unpredictable, political crises even more so. Budget day was fixed, annual and it promised drama.
By the 1990s, newspaper supplements were being commissioned weeks in advance, ready to be stuffed with tables and commentary. Illustrators were tasked with producing portraits of different types of imaginary family whose gains and losses would be totted up. Ministers got their moment of national attention; editors got the certainty of a spike in midweek print sales; voters got the sense that, at least once a year, the government had explained itself.
But the logic has been breaking down for a while now. In the age of rolling news and push alerts, the idea of a single day of revelation doesn’t fit the tempo any more. Ministers scatter announcements across the year – summer statements, investment plans, selective leaks to favoured outlets.
Meanwhile, the media has been transformed by its own economics. The decline of advertising revenue has forced newspapers into subscription models that prize specialist depth and service journalism over mass spectacle. So instead of commissioning bulky supplements, editors now invest in tax calculators, explainers, live blogs and podcasts.
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These are genuinely useful for readers but they atomise attention. If you can get a personalised answer on your phone to how much your take-home pay will change, why would you plough through acres of generalist reportage or endless and repetitive panel discussions?
Besides, in a disaggregated media ecosystem, everyone’s a creator. Economists, think tanks and self-appointed experts post their own rapid analysis online, while financial services companies, most of whom now have their own content studios, can pump out analysis and advice faster than traditional broadcasters can cut their packages.
As a result, the budget still matters in substance but has lost some of its collective force as theatre. Taxes will change (although not very much this year, we gather), spending will shift, priorities will be tweaked. But the shared moment – the sense that the whole country is watching the same thing at the same time – has ebbed away. Instead, citizens receive the budget as a series of personalised bullet points delivered through whatever channel they prefer.
Is this something to regret? There’s a temptation to wax nostalgic about the days when households gathered around the wireless, or when tomorrow’s newspaper was thick with extra pages. But it was also an era of cliches and simplifications. “A penny on the pint” made a good headline, but it was rarely the most important measure in the document. The spectacle may have been more entertaining, but it wasn’t necessarily more informative.
Today’s fragmented coverage, while less dramatic, often offers better journalism. Macroeconomic analysis arrives faster, is more accessible and often more rigorous than before, while online tools provide clarity at the household level.
Still, something has gone missing. There was once a civic weight to budget day, a sense that for one afternoon the country stopped to listen while the government laid out its choices and the press relayed them in unison. In our contemporary media world, that kind of shared attention is almost impossible to recreate. Perhaps that’s no bad thing. But it does mean that when the two Ministers enter a packed Dáil chamber this afternoon, the cheers and jeers will reverberate less loudly across the country than they once did.
