THE PLANNED €15 billion in adjustments over the next four years has been “plucked out of the air” by the Government, according to the Labour leader Eamon Gilmore.
Mr Gilmore said the figure was not supported by evidence. “We do not know what the €15 billion figure is based on, because the Government has not produced any projections for the elements that are going to make that up.
“We have no figures, for instance, for growth for the coming year or, indeed, for the following years.”
The Government had also failed to make projections on investment, consumption and exports.
He said it did look as “though the amount will be more than the €7.5 billion that was originally projected”.
Pressed to give a figure within a range, Mr Gilmore, in an interview on RTÉ Radio's This Weekprogramme yesterday, said his party did not have any information other than what was in the public domain.
A wider set of objectives was needed in the State than just getting the deficit down, he said. People needed to know what kind of country it was going to be by 2014.
“I think that what has been happening over the past couple of months is we are being talked into a state of despair in this country,” he added.
“We do have a very serious deficit problem, and, yes, we have to get out of that . . . but we also need a strategy for jobs, growth and getting the economy moving again.”
Mr Gilmore said that anybody could come up with a figure for the required adjustments. It was the Government’s job to identify and decide the growth projections, and, based on that, make a decision on the figure to be achieved over a period of time, he said.
He added that the Government had been wrong in its economic projections in the past.
Mr Gilmore ruled out cutting children’s allowances, even for those earning more than €100,000 annually.
The money, he said, could be taken from high-earners through the taxation system, because means-testing arrangements could cost as much to administer as was saved.
The Labour leader added that the Government had failed to bring forward reform proposals under the Croke Park deal on public service pay.
Labour, he said, believed in the redeployment of public service staff and a voluntary redundancy scheme involving about 15,000 employees. He said that the party had not costed the redundancy scheme.
Public service pensions should be related to current pay levels, he added.
Asked about the refusal of lower-paid civil servants to give up a fortnightly half hour “bank time”, Mr Gilmore said it was a practice from the past.
“What I cannot understand here is why that has not been negotiated out of the system in agreements made in the past.”
The civil servants involved felt that people on the lower grades were being asked to make the sacrifices, while the privileges of those on higher grades were not being touched at all.
Mr Gilmore repeated his party’s view that nobody in the public service, including the Taoiseach, should be paid more than €200,000, adding that there was scope for looking at the figure again.
