"I'm an economist, not a moralist, so let's deal with economic issues." So said Dr. Peter Bacon on Thursday's Prime Time programme. He was being asked about the morality of making the country fund the banks' bad debts. That answer shines a bright light on the root cause of our current economic woes.

How  we  make our money and how we spend it is a moral issue. Economics always involves  morality, be it good or bad morality. Gordon Gekko - of "Wall Street" fame - understood this: "Greed is good." That was his moral take on economics. It seems he had a lot of disciples in Ireland, though few will now admit their allegiance to his creed.

Jesus of Nazareth took a different view to Gordon. "Be on your guard against all kinds of greed. A person's life does not consist in how much they possess." For him too, how we viewed and handled wealth was a moral issue; a life issue. 

You can argue that greed is good; you can argue that greed is bad; but there are no grounds for arguing that greed is not a moral issue. To argue that "I will make the economic choices and someone else will make the moral choices" is like drawing a line on water. Sooner or later we have to recognise that what is  going on inside us  will determine what we do with our money, and our lives. 

Seán Mullan

Thursday, 09 April, 2009 

A budget is a moral document, a clear statement of what your values are.

We all put our money into the things that matter most to us. So any budget, be it of a family, a company or a nation reflects its values more than any words do. A national budget is not simply about managing the public finances - it is a statement by a government about what its values are, where its priorities lie.

So what matters to our government? Clearly the poorest of the world's poor do not matter. Nor do vulnerable children and nor do those living closest to the edge.

A cut of €100 million on top of three prior cuts in the last nine months sends the simple message that the poorest of the world's poor do not matter. They are at the bottom of the the league table of what the government values.

An across the board cut in childcare supplements, regardless of income, means children are also in the relegation zone in the values table.

And the cutting of rent supplements, regardless of whether rent willcome down, means vulnerable unemployed people are down in the same area of the values table.

Yet the collective price paid by these vulnerable people will go towards paying the bill for the bail-out of one, just one, of our banks, institutions which clearly rank very highly on our governments values table.

This budget lacks two basic things. It lacks a confession of the failure of the politics of greed. And it lacks a commitment to develop a new kind of politics, based on better values. 

Political talk is cheap. It's easy to speak about values. But budgets demonstrate values. They are moral documents, or in some cases, immoral ones.

Seán Mullan