THE GOVERNMENT'S plan to abolish the Combat Poverty Agency shows it is readying to attack the poor in next month's budget, Labour leader Eamon Gilmore has declared.
A report being examined by Minister for Social and Family Affairs Mary Hanafin recommends the agency should be subsumed back into the department.
Speaking in Mullingar, Co Westmeath, yesterday, Mr Gilmore said: "We have heard a lot about State agencies in recent times, largely from people who set up the agencies in the first place.
"But what is the first one that they decide should go: the Combat Poverty Agency. They produce a consultant's report but, in my experience, departments already know what the consultants will recommend before they ask for one to be done." He added: "It is clear that they want to put the watchdog back in the kennel before a budget that will hurt poor people.
"It is particularly deplorable that the Government appears to be using the economic crisis to settle scores by closing down organisations that performed a watchdog role on behalf of the public and that may have caused Ministers some embarrassment."
So far, "inspired leaks" have indicated where the spending cuts will come: "In the past, cuts in government spending have been targeted at social programmes. These have often resulted in false economies, such as where in-home services for elderly people have been cut, leading to greater demands on acute hospital beds, or where social housing programmes have been cut leading to greater demands on funds for emergency accommodation.
"Let's be clear, if there is to be pain, let's make sure that it is borne by those who gained most from the celtic tiger economy," said Mr Gilmore, who was in Mullingar to announce that the party's 2009 conference would take place in the town next March.
Asked about the expected demise of the Progressive Democrats, Mr Gilmore said the voters in last year's general election took the decision that it should end.
He had "become concerned by the right-wing drift" in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in recent times, who believe that everything can be solved by cutting public spending.
It was instructive, he said, to consider that the PDs were disappearing off the Irish political stage "at the same time that their political message has been discredited.
"They were the ones who argued that the market would solve everything, that the State had no role to play in the economy. Now people know that message was wrong," he said.
