THE Right has won the election already, irrespective of whoever is elected to office on June 6th. The pre-occupations of the Right crime and taxation dominate the campaign. Nowhere are the traditional concerns of the Left equality and civil liberties - apparent.
Five weeks ago today, John Bruton launched the government's national anti-poverty strategy, Sharing in Progress. That document acknowledged that in 1994 "34 per cent of the population were living on disposable incomes below 60 per cent of the national average". It also acknowledged that 15 per cent of the population live in conditions of "persistent poverty".
Speaking at the launch of this anti-poverty strategy, he spoke of the need to be focused "on ensuring that the benefit of economic growth are shared equitably". "We need to bring the same energy, commitment and skill to the tackling of poverty as we brought to the achievement of record economic and employment growth."
Unfortunately, there is not a whit of evidence from the manifesto of John Bruton's party that there is now any focus at all in sharing the benefits of economic growth. Not a whit of evidence that in the preparation of the manifesto that anything like the "same energy, commitment and skill" was brought to bear on policies to share the benefits of economic growth equitably as there on policies which will do the exact opposite.
In so far as Fine Gael is concerned about sharing the benefits of economic growth, it is through the aspirational (and now discredited) mechanism of reducing long-term unemployment. Nothing about the immediate and direct alleviation of the persistent poverty experienced by Is per cent of the population and the poverty prevailing among 34 per cent of the population. And yes, there is the pathetic commitment - shared by the two left-wing parties in government - to meet by 1999 the minimum standards of social welfare payments recommended by the Commission on Social Welfare in 1985.
All parties are committed to widescale tax reductions. As Father Sean Healy of CORI points out, these policies have no relevance at all to the poorest 30 per cent of the population, who don't even come within the tax net. But for those that do, the impact of the proposed tax reductions of three of the main parties (Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and the Progressive Democrats) is to favour massively the rich in society and without any social or economic justification. What justification is there for reducing the relatively low tax rate of 48 per cent on incomes of, say, over £50,000?
Every party identifies crime as a major issue, without explaining why. Just over two weeks ago the Department of Justice published a discussion paper on Tackling Crime". This showed we have by far the lowest crime rate in Europe. It illustrates clearly that there has been no crime wave in the last several years or indeed in the last decade. It shows there has been a reduction in offences against the person in the last 20 years. Only in the areas of sexual offences has there been a notable increase and, as is obvious, the statistics are notorious unreliable in this area because of changing attitudes towards the reporting of such crimes.
So what accounts for the prominence that the en me issue has in the election campaign and, indeed in the media?
The discussion paper gingerly addresses the issue of the causes of crime. Eventually, it gets around to the observation: "The first requirement, in the Department's view, is that society itself should be convinced of the need to address the problem of disadvantage" (paragraph 7.13). This observation follows an extensive review of the literature on the causes of crime.
One might think that the party of the Minister for Justice, under whose auspices this document was supposedly produced, would focus on this "first requirement". Not a bit of it. The old Fine Gael "law and order reflex" is in full swing - more repressive laws, more prison spaces. Out of more than loo paragraphs on crime only six to eight (depending on what you include) allude to the social and economic dimensions of crime.
THE Progressive Democrats' crime policy is, predictably, worse. There is not a single recognition of the economic and social dimensions of crime, or of that dimension of the problem of drug abuse.
Fianna Fail has become almost a caricature of the PDs on crime with the nonsense about "zero tolerance" from the party that insisted a few years ago on absolute tolerance for criminals who engaged in tax evasion. But it is in the commitment to provide 2,000 extra prison places that Fianna Fail is most reckless.
Just three years ago, in June, 1994, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, as the then Fianna Fail Minister for Justice, published a report, The Management of Offenders. A Five Year Plan. Following an extensive review of the crime phenomenon and the penal system it concluded that 200 extra prison places were required, over the period covered by the plan: 1994-1999 (paragraph 3.16). But now Fianna Fail has committed itself to the provision of 1,800 prison spaces in addition to the 200 proposed three years ago.
The report also revealed that the cost of providing new places of detention was "at least" £110,000 each and the current cost was £37,000 a year on average per offender (paragraph 3.8). Thus what John O'Donoghue, the FF Justice spokesman, is proposing will cost £198 million in capital cost and £66 million per annum in current costs.
Try asking John O'Donoghue, the architect of this madness, what has happened in the three years since Maire Geoghegan-Quinn thought 200 extra places were enough, to justify such exorbitant expenditure. The level of reported crime has gone down in the three years since then, there has been no increase in serious crime bar a blip in the murder rate last year from a very low base.
Just think of what a capital injection of £200 million would do to the deprived areas of our cities from where most of the crime emanates (as shown by the excellent study recently published by Paul O'Mahony, Mountjoy Prisoners: A Sociological and Criminological Profile. Add to that a current subvention into those areas of £66 million. Think what such a financial injection into these areas would do to the problem of hard drug abuse.
Even ignoring the arguments from equity in favour of such expenditures, the impact on crime would be enormously greater than a gearing up of the penal system, which elsewhere has been shown to be so unsuccessful.
You might think that Democratic Left would raise a cheep against this consensus but not a murmur.
The proudest boast of the Progressive Democrats is that they have "made a difference". They have.