Last night on Prime Time Special

The Fine Gael Finance Minister, Michael Noonan, looked well on TV last night. Over recent months, he’s been showing his age and then some – an eye  rheumy and inflamed, skin blotchy, shoulders slumped. Clearly a man feeling the weight of juggling the south’s finances. But last night he looked well. Maybe it was the quality of his make-up, or maybe he had the air of a man who knows he’s going through this particular mangle for the last time and so exuded an air of release and even euphoria.

The Prime Time Special last night was originally to have had a head-to-head between Mr Noonan and Pearse Doherty of Sinn Féin, but this didn’t happen. You can see why Fianna Fail didn’t want it to happen. Normally the Finance Minister faces a debate with the Finance spokesperson for the main opposition party. Fianna Fail, in terms of seats, is undoubtedly the main opposition party in the Dail. So why didn’t we get a Michael Noonan- Michael McGrath debate? (Yes indeed, Virginia – a debate between two Mickeys.)

Well, it’s complicated. Almost certainly RTÉ didn’t want to host such a head-to-head. The simple reason being that it wouldn’t have been a head-to-head. The budget presented by Noonan of Fine Gael was in fact the joint work of Fine Gael-Fianna Fail. So who wants a love-in about how wonderful the two parties have been in producing it? Or equally bad, who wants to have the two party spokesmen both claiming the ‘good’ bits of the budget and disowning the ‘bad’ bits? What RTÉ wanted was a proponent of the budget and a critic (preferably caustic) of the budget. The Noonan-Doherty match would have delivered on that. But that would have meant Fianna Fail admitting that in practice, it wasn’t the main opposition party, Sinn Féin was. In the end viewers got – left to right: Michael McGrath, Pearse Doherty, Michael Noonan and Denis Naughten, an Independent TD but also a Minister in the government. I told you it was complicated.

Was it a good budget? Fine Gael and Fianna Fail said it was a good budget (shiver me timbers, Jim lad) and Sinn Féin said it was a hopeless budget (shiver some more , Jim). Significantly, though, the first three people in the audience that Miriam O’Callaghan asked for their opinion all said it’d make little or no difference to their straitened circumstances.

Television and, to a lesser extent, politics are part of the entertainment industry. But politics is also about clarity: in this case budget clarity. What has been offered and what’s good or bad about it. It’d have been a safe bet we’d have got that from a Noonan-Doherty encounter and a clearer picture of what’s good and what stinks in the budget. But alas, it didn’t happen…Come to think of it, maybe that’s why Michael Noonan looked more relaxed and relieved last night. That Doherty boy is a bit of a bruiser.