Minimum wage cut would be a disaster -- Kenny
Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny warned last night that any attempt to reduce the minimum wage would drive more and more people into the social welfare bracket.
He has called for the prioritisation of job creation over social welfare cuts.
"Social welfare happens because people become unemployed. The way you deal with that is by putting the people back to work. Otherwise you go into a situation of a spiral downwards where more and more is being borrowed to pay more and more on social welfare and that is not the future that I see," he said.
Speaking at the MacGill Summer School, he also revealed he had asked every front bench member of the party to provide finance spokesman Richard Bruton with their examples of what was achievable in terms of savings within the different departments.
This would include looking at the McCarthy recommendations, but he said that McCarthy was not the sole agenda.
"His report is an outsider's perspective on the bigger picture. There are huge efficiencies which can be brought about within existing services, many of which are now being put forward by the public service themselves because they know where the efficiencies can be had," he said.
Mr Kenny believed that Fine Gael would win the next election and, in preparation for that, he had sought plans in advance from prospective ministers on how Fine Gael's programmes were going to be implemented.
"I want to see a situation where ministers to be appointed to the cabinet know their business of what they are going to be about from the first day they take office -- and the first hundred days will be a measure of their success."
He added that ministers in the new government will be moved on if they don't measure up and will face dismissal if they step out of line or abuse their responsibility.
"We can't afford not to have competency and decisiveness in the next government," he said.
He also said that Fine Gael supported a reduction of between 10 and 20 TD's which, he pointed out, could happen without any constitutional change. And he indicated he would support the amalgamation of some cities and county councils.
However, he said there was a future role for the Seanad with a changed remit and voting system.
Mr Kenny was also critical of a shift in power away from the Oireachtas. "We have a system in the house of parliament where effective authority has been sucked away from the Oireachtas to the executive.
Scrutiny
"The Dail committee system is not functioning at all in the way it should. There is no scrutiny given to estimates.
"There are no answers provided by ministers either at estimates time or in the Dail to any great extent and that needs to be changed radically," he said.
The Fine Gael leader described the McCarthy report as "an absolutely damning indictment of the way that government has been run for the last decade".
"In one swoop, the McCarthy report has sidelined the hundreds of consultant reports that lie on department shelves, costly, unimplemented and now irrelevant and for which minister after minister deny any responsibility.
"The sheer volume of recommendations, many of which came from civil servants themselves, points to a complete failure of management and direction by this government," he said.
Also last night, Martin Murphy, MD of Hewlett Packard, called for a new enterprise culture focused on exports of goods and services to the global economy to get Ireland back on track.
- Anita Guidera
