Sinn Féin’s General Election manifesto launch on Tuesday morning was different.
Fine Gael managed to make its presence felt inside the venue while the event was still under way at the cosy Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin’s Temple Bar.
Sinn Féin’s top brass had been extolling the virtues of its 177-page manifesto, entitled ‘The Choice For Change’, when journalists’ phones began to ping with rebuttal from Fine Gael’s Paschal Donohoe.
The Dublin Central candidate didn’t deploy dull prose either.
The outgoing Public Expenditure and Reform Minister was in expansive form claiming that Sinn Féin was engaged in “the biggest heist ever on the island of Ireland with the raiding of carefully saved funds and throwing caution to the wind”.
The central accusation was profligacy.
Paschal Donohoe framed it as “Fine Gael has carefully built up funds for the future that now total €16bn”.
However, he claimed Sinn Féin was now “robbing the country’s piggy bank”.
Yet, Sinn Féin’s Spokesperson on Finance Pearse Doherty didn’t flinch when the accusation was thrown at him.
Instead, he smiled and replied that Paschal Donohoe had got it wrong when he criticised Fianna Fáil’s manifesto the previous week and had now done it again with Sinn Féin.
“It’s embarrassing for him”, he quipped.
The problem for Fine Gael was that the Sinn Féin manifesto didn’t contain an explicit commitment to spend the €16bn in the Future Ireland Fund and the Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund.
Instead, on page 170, it said: “Sinn Féin will run a budgetary surplus every year, with an accumulated surplus of €14.8bn by 2030. Surpluses after our investment plan will be invested in State funds.”
Paschal Donohoe’s lengthy statement on Sinn Féin’s manifesto contained lots of criticisms, including the provocative question: “How long will it take before the economy collapses from their economic proposals?”
Yet on the central charge – a Sinn Féin intention to squander €16bn currently squirrelled away in the twin rainy day funds – the party’s manifesto didn’t say what Fine Gael said it said.
When arriving for Cabinet yesterday morning, Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin employed a broader critique of Sinn Féin’s economic plans.
Framing their manifesto as a “tax and spend” disaster, he claimed it contained an “eye-watering €3.5bn in tax hikes, which I think will really, really damage the enterprise economy and will tax a lot of people out of existence – particularly small and medium-sized companies.”
He then proceeded to echo the Fine Gael critique but, notably, didn’t mention Sinn Féin’s manifesto.
He said: “We’re aiming to have €16bn [saved] by the end of 2025. We’re aiming to have €50bn put aside by the end of the decade. Sinn Féin wants to spend it all now, that will have a huge inflationary impact by the way.”
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The fiscal row might have dissipated except for the fact that Fine Gael decided to not just maintain its onslaught but intensify it.
On Merrion Square, post Cabinet, Paschal Donohoe and his party colleague Peter Burke unveiled an attack video on Sinn Féin which included a pink piggy bank being smashed open by hammers and the cash speedily grabbed.
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When speaking to journalists, Paschal Donohoe unleashed some prepared zingers.
He quipped that to fulfil all of Sinn Féin’s manifesto plans, there would need to be not just a magic money tree but “a whole forest of them”.
However, there was also a change in message.
Mr Donohoe said Fine Gael was now calling on Sinn Féin to commit to retaining the €16bn in the State’s two savings funds, if returned to government.
That’s different from declaring that they were going to spend it.
The commitment was necessary, Fine Gael sources asserted, as Sinn Féin had voted against legislation which guaranteed allocations to the funds year-on-year.
The impression was left that Fine Gael believed Sinn Féin’s stated promise to invest surpluses in State saving funds – after the party’s investment plan – was far too fiscally ambiguous.
One thing that Paschal Donohoe did not do at Merrion Square was to row back on his claim that Sinn Féin’s manifesto involved squandering billions from the savings funds – something which irked the party leader.
Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald declared that Fine Gael senior politicians “…seem to be unable to actually read accurately the Sinn Féin proposal.”
The row deepened when Fine Gael leader Simon Harris told journalists in Naas that Sinn Féin was preparing to spend money the Government had set aside to “protect future generations from austerity”.
Pearse Doherty decided to publish a no holds barred statement accusing Paschal Donohoe of telling “bare faced lies with the latest pathetic Fine Gael election ad”.
He declared: “Sinn Féin’s manifesto is very clear. We will not spend the €16bn in the funds and indeed will add to the funds growing then to €31bn over next five years.”
The Donegal TD didn’t stop there.
Mr Doherty said that Sinn Féin would “invest the public money wisely” as opposed to Fine Gael which had, in government, been “incinerating the public’s money” including “€500,000 on private jets for Simon Harris”.
This is a row which isn’t going away.
The economy is the prism through which many voters will decide on how to cast their ballot.
Expect more of the same over the remaining days of this fascinating election campaign – although piggy banks might not feature again.
