Government faces grilling on bailouts in debate on Budget
Tuesday November 17 2009
THE Government is to be quizzed on the €4bn it provided to keep Anglo Irish Bank afloat during today's pre-Budget Dail debate.
The sum is part of the €26bn deficit in the public finances and is exactly the same amount the Government is seeking in spending cutbacks.
Labour finance spokeswoman Joan Burton said this was why she could not accept the Government's claim that the banking crisis was nothing to do with the crisis in the public finances.
"We've put in a series of questions about the pre-Budget outlook because some of the figures don't make sense," she said.
But Taoiseach Brian Cowen has upped the pressure on both Labour and Fine Gael ahead of the four-hour debate on the pre-Budget outlook produced by the Department of Finance.
It predicts unemployment will rise further next year to hit 13.75pc but that the economy will return to growth in 2011.
Last weekend, Mr Cowen challenged Fine Gael and Labour to produce realistic alternatives to his Government's €4bn cost-cutting plan, and both parties have promised that they would do so.
But Labour leader Eamon Gilmore said it showed Mr Cowen could not resist the temptation to put on the tribal war-paint and beat the tom-toms for the Fianna Fail faithful by trying to give the opposition a good kicking.
He retaliated by referring to Fianna Fail's record during the 1980s, when it opposed many of the cost-cutting measures proposed by the Fine Gael-Labour coalition. He said: "Can anyone realistically suggest that, were the situations reversed and Fianna Fail in opposition, that they would be supporting an adjustment of €4bn in a budget?
"One has only to look at their record in opposition during the economic crisis of the 1980s to get an answer to that question."
- Michael Brennan and Barry Duggan
Irish Independent
