Holding politicians to account for how they spend our money is the job of the Oireachtas. It is also meat and drink to the media. Who doesn’t like a juicy story about the squandering of taxpayer money?
But there are times when it feels like we have taken it all a bit too far. It is hard to believe there are too many other European countries where the decision to spend €1 million – less than 0.001 per cent of the national budget – on a secure meeting room in Government Buildings to enable communication with other governments would constitute news. Never mind warrant full-on parliamentary scrutiny.
It is even harder to imagine the leader of the country would appear before a parliamentary committee to justify the expense. But last week Michéal Martin duly turned up at the select committee on finance to explain why he needed to be able to talk to other leaders from Government Buildings without the risk of bad actors eavesdropping.
It was an absurd moment. In truth the question the committee should have been asking the Taoiseach was why he didn’t get one of these rooms sooner. But that would not chime with the tenor of these occasions, which seem to be driven by an atavistic belief that the public doesn’t want politicians to have nice things
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The new Government jet – which arrived in December – is another example of this selective puritanism. The idea that a rich country deciding to replacing its clapped out 21-year-old jet with a new one at a cost of €53 million is in some way scandalous is hard to credit. So is the fact that the expenditure had to be justified in the Dáil by the Minster for Defence with a detailed explanation of the other more worthwhile purposes it would be put to beyond ferrying politicians to Brussels and beyond.
Of course, the Government has not exactly helped itself. Spending taxpayer money wisely is one thing. It is, after all, what they were elected to do. But spending it badly on themselves is another. And there is no shortage of examples of the latter, with the €336,000 spent on the Oireachtas bike shed in 2024 a case in point.
Bur our extreme reluctance to let politicians spend money on the trappings of office – and in some cases the necessities – is still hard to fathom.
There is a multitude of possible explanations, all of which are at least partially plausible. There is of course good old-fashioned begrudgery: what have they done to deserve jets and “Nato-proof” meeting rooms. Such notions!
This, in turn, is tied into the hyper local and very personal nature of our politics as well as the very recent and precarious nature of our national wealth. The Government is currently well able to afford a jet, and the cost benefit argument is easy to make. Likewise, a secure meeting room.
But we are still only 16 years on from a national bankruptcy that saw us go to Europe and the International Monetary Fund with our hands out and trousers down. Many of us are still dealing with the consequences – including a broken property market. And so the idea of nice things for politicians does not sit well – particularly when we know the politicians in question and their role in our national humiliation.
And of course there is always the English and their 800 years of oppression; the default explanation for so much that is wrong with contemporary Ireland. But in this case, there might be something to it.
Our sense of civic nationalism is profoundly shaped by our history and the failure of the majority of the population to identify with the British state that ruled them for hundreds of years. Its impact lingers on, despite the success our own State has enjoyed.
Where others might see a shiny new jet as a shared symbol of national success, we still tend to see an elite spending our money on themselves.
There is, of course, the possibility that the public doesn’t really care about these things as much as politicians think we do. Or at least as much as we used to.
The Government buying a new jet when taxes are rising and social welfare payments are being cut is one thing; it is another thing in the time of plenty.
But no one can – or will – flog a dead horse better than an Opposition politician looking for headlines.
