By Pádraig O’Flynn
Paschal Donohoe is moving up in the world. Ireland’s now former Minister for Finance and TD for Dublin Central has abruptly dropped his lowly national roles like hot potatoes and made a beeline for Washington, DC to take up his new job at the World Bank. It comes only ten months after being appointed to Finance again, and not quite a year since the general election. This is not the act of a self-interested, ladder-climbing careerist, though, as here is a man utterly devoted to ‘public service’, at least according to the chorus of breathless hagiographies coming from the capitalist media.
Nevertheless, as Managing Director (albeit one of four) and ‘Chief Knowledge Officer’, he will effectively quadruple his earnings, as his new pay package totals just over €600,000 and is tax-free. Only the President of the organisation (an appointee of the US President) sits above him. All is rosy in Paschal’s garden, but, as one of the most consequential Irish politicians of the past decade, he leaves a trail of human carnage in his wake.
A miserly budget
His last miserly budget looks increasingly like it was calculated with one eye on his next job. You can’t hope to work as an international glorified loan shark imposing strict economic conditions on the world’s poorest countries if you’re seen to be some sort of bleeding heart in the eyes of Washington powerbrokers. Amidst the gushing praise from the Irish media, who’ve long dubbed him “’ Prudent Paschal”, that budget was pointed to by a few of those same journalists as a rare negative.
They rightly pointed to the glaring lack of tax cuts for workers (not least as it included themselves), in contrast to the previous ‘election’ budget, which had lowered taxes (albeit marginally) on workers. His reticence to give workers any respite amidst the still-rising cost of living was despite another large surplus of €8 billion. This, like other surpluses before it is largely being placed into various ‘rainy day’ funds. In reality, we can expect these to be raided come the next economic downturn to bail out the capitalist class, just as the €21-billion supposed Pension Reserve Fund was used to bail out banks and their bondholders, and write off massive property developer debts after the 2008 crash.
The cost of living hurricane
Also, the rainy day is now. In fact it’s more like a hurricane when it comes to the multiple social crises raging in housing, health, the environment, education (particularly for children with disabilities), the ongoing cost of living crisis, the disintegration of water and sewage infrastructure (in Cork City thousands of people are still suffering discoloured, unsafe water over three years after the botched, expensive privatisation of a major water treatment plant corroded the aging pipe network).
‘Prudent’ Paschal has observed all of these disasters unfolding (as well as actively developing/voting for the policies that created them), but remained unmoved. As an example, replacing the hundreds of miles of Cork’s disintegrating water pipes would cost around €500 million – using the most recent budget surplus alone, it could be done 16 times over. Apparently, it’s more prudent for ordinary people to be spending thousands on replacing damaged appliances and clothes, bottled water and even hotel gym memberships just to use showers that won’t give them or their children a rash.
The Disability Federation of Ireland described Budget 2026 as “a devastating setback for disabled people”. On the surface, it provided an increase in funding for disability services and up to a (paltry) tenner weekly increase in the max disability allowance. However, this masked the complete removal of social protection supports like the Disability Support Grant, which left disabled people significantly worse off. Apparently, driving disabled people further into poverty is the prudent thing to do.
Not everyone was worse off, though – developers got yet another tax break through a VAT reduction on apartment sales, as did little ol’ McDonald’s, which benefited from the reduction in VAT on restaurants to 9% – a successful lobbying campaign based on spurious claims of a restaurant closure crisis.
A corporate politician
From a Fine Gael family and a party member since his teens, Donohoe traded in a successful corporate career in England to try his hand at politics back home in 2003. He was elected to Dublin City Council the following year. He failed to win a Dáil seat in 2007, but accepted the typical runner-up prize for establishment wannabe TDs – a seat in the Seanad. After again losing in a 2009 by-election, he became a TD in 2011, as support for Fianna Fáil (and the Greens) collapsed.
Two years into the FG-labour coalition government, he became a junior minister for European Affairs, taking over from arch-conservative Lucinda Creighton after she voted against government abortion legislation. Just a year later, in 2014, he was Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport. His two-year tenure was marked by industrial action and privatisations. He oversaw the selling off of the state’s remaining 25% stake in the formerly state-owned Aer Lingus, completing the privatisation process begun by Fianna Fáil.
In 2015, he attempted to face down strikes by train workers over pay and conditions, and bus workers in response to the (government-appointed) National Transport Authority’s decision to privatise 10% of Bus Éireann and Dublin Bus routes. They’d also suffered a decade of pay stagnation and broken promises on previous agreements. After a few days, the union leaders quickly suspended the strikes for negotiations. A poor deal meant further strikes would be necessary in the coming years. Luas drivers went on strike in 2016. Despite vilification from the media which helped turn public opinion against them, the strike was determined and well-organised and the workers largely won their demands.
Mentored by Noonan
After the 2016 general election, he became Minister for Public Expenditure. This year he also effectively took over Finance ahead of the budget from an ailing Michael Noonan, and officially in 2017, as the latter stepped aside. Luckily for him, his taking over virtually coincided with a return to surpluses in 2018 for the first time since the crash. He stayed at Finance until 2022 and Public Expenditure until 2020, before returning to the latter in 2022 due to having to rotate with their FF coalition partners. His time at the latter was probably most associated (or should have been) with the twin budgeting/public procurement disasters of the National Broadband Plan and the National Children’s Hospital, both of which were originally promised for ca. €500 million during the bidding process before somehow ballooning to almost €3 billion.
From 2020 to 2025, Donohoe was also President of the Eurogroup (another opaque, undemocratic EU body made up of finance ministers from countries that use the euro). It had no discernible benefit for ordinary Irish people, but the publicity and networking opportunity seems to have done wonders for his career.
Far from just another soulless technocrat, Donohoe likes to portray himself as a Man of Culture. Much is made of his love of reading and music. Outside of budget time, it’s clear he hasn’t exactly been run off his feet given the amount of books he’s reviewed (and presumably read) for the Irish Times, among others. Appearing on Newstalk podcast, Top 5 Books, a notable selection was the memoir of Denis Healey, a right-wing Cold Warrior from the British Labour Party. Healy was a minister in the 60s and 70s, he resorted to inviting the IMF in during an economic crisis and implementing vicious austerity. The anger and disillusionment this engendered in working-class communities paved the way for Thatcher. He was also a cheerleader for the Korean War and collaborated with MI5 to witch-hunt Marxists out of union positions. In other words, a fellow ‘centrist’.
Complicit in the genocide
An avid gig-goer, a video of Donohoe went viral this summer when he went to see Macklemore (one of the most vociferous proponents for the Palestinian cause in mainstream Western music) and, predictably, got confronted by attendees, including a woman who questioned him over his record on the genocide and the Occupied Territories Bill. She picked an apt target.
Leaked Israeli documents reported on by the Ditch last year indicate Donohoe, as Finance Minister had a secret phone call with his Israeli counterpart in which he promised that the OTB would be blocked using a money message – a wildly anti-democratic technical manoeuvre that can effectively be used to kill any bill the government doesn’t like, even if it wins a vote in the Dáil. Donohoe tried to deny the phone call happened, and yet was blocked by a money message, which was precisely the OTB’s fate when it managed to actually pass a vote in the Dáil seven years ago, thanks to the then minority government and some of their TDs not turning up.
A capitalist worldview
Donohoe, a zealous and capable proponent of his capitalist worldview with no shortage of self-confidence, invariably (and annoyingly) cut a chirpy figure even when defending the indefensible (which was often), all made easier given his cosy relationship with the media. A rare example where the cheery mask fell off was when he became embroiled in a scandal in 2023 for not fully declaring his donations received during the 2016 and 2020 general elections. As well as declared donations from an FG oligarch, Michael Stone, he also received two vans and a crew of workers to put up his posters, which were undeclared, and got him in light trouble with SIPO. Stone is worth the bones of €100 million through his engineering company The Design Group, which has won state contracts in the past. Most of the coverage focused on the undeclared aspect; the fact that all establishment parties are funded by the rich is normalised.
Donohoe sees his party (along with their various coalition partners) as paragons of moderation, representing the sensible self-appointed ‘centre’. He was extremely pleased that the ‘centre held’ in the last general election. In some ways, there are few places where the ‘extreme centre’ is more deranged. How else can you describe an ideology that recognises the Gaza Genocide as such, but also assists Israel’s gun-running operation, has secret friendly phone calls to discuss how to protect Israel from consequences and subvert democracy, and does more trade with it than any country outside the US?
In his words of farewell, Donohoe thanked various people, but was most effusive towards Michael Noonan – his mentor and hero. This is a man who praised the positive role of vulture funds in the economy. He continued the FF/Greens policy of spending €100 billion (including interest) bailing out almost every failed bank bond speculator with one hand, while carrying out ferocious vandalism of public services with the other.
Thousands of deaths have occurred as a result of these ‘moderates’ taking a wrecking ball to our public health system. They have committed nothing short of mass social murder in the service of capitalism. And been well rewarded for it.
