LABOUR RESPONSE:THE REDUCTION of 17,000 public service jobs, as recommended in the McCarthy report, was "doable", Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore said yesterday.
“17,000 is doable, yes,” he said. “If you have a public service of over 300,000 people it is possible to reduce numbers by that amount.”
He told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland: “I believe it is possible to reduce numbers in the public service.”
“We had proposed two years back, when the Health Service Executive was established, that there were surplus numbers because the numbers were never reduced from the old health board days. That is still possible to do,” he said.
But he added: “I don’t think there is scope to do it on frontline services.”
Speaking to reporters later in the morning, Mr Gilmore accused the Government of being “cowardly” in its response to the publication of the report.
“When a Government asks consultants to bring in recommendations on what Government should be doing anyway, Government already knows what the recommendations are going to be,” he said.
It was time to “get real” he said.
“This was not Colm McCarthy’s report. This is a Government report.”
He said the Cabinet wanted to maintain “deniability” about some of the more unpopular proposals and “frankly I think the Government is being cowardly.
“If you look at some of the problems that McCarthy has identified in the running of our public services – how many reports have we got about reform of the public service in the lifetime of the present Government?”
Sinn Féin’s leader in the Dáil, Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin, said the Government had “no mandate” to implement the measures in the report which would “devastate healthcare for the sick, education for children, care for older people and social supports for all those who need them”.
Calling for a national debate on the “way forward” as well as a general election, Mr Ó Caoláin said: “The sweeping measures in the McCarthy report, if implemented, would slash and burn across our public services.”
The Socialist Workers’ Party said: “The report uses the guises of an objective examination of public spending to produce an agenda of attacks on the poor.
“The €5 billion cuts package can only deepen the recession and cause even more unemployment,” the party said.