Tánaiste Mary Coughlan today denied Opposition claims the Government is in disarray and insisted the McCarthy report on spending cuts had not been shelved.
Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore yesterday said the remarks in the Dáil by Ms Coughlan that many of the recommendations in the McCarthy report "did not make sense" was an indication of “disarray in Government”.
However, responding to Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny in the Dáil this morning, Ms Coughlan said the report was providing options for the Government to consider within the context of planning for the December budget.
"If there are alternatives to those options, they will be considered. All of this will be considered by the Government, but the bottom line is there will have to be €4 billion of reductions and expenditure be found, " she told Mr Kenny.
"So, contrary to what you said in your press release, the Government is not in disarray, and contrary to your other opinion that McCarthy is shelved, it is not."
Yesterday, Mr Gilmore said Ms Coughlan's comments, in response to a point he had raised during Leader’s Questions, was part of a pattern involving a number of Ministers refusing to take responsibility for the recommendations made in the McCarthy report.
Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan maintained the McCarthy report remains “key to the budgetary process”, and said the Government is committed to sorting out the problems facing the country.
Asked about his Cabinet colleague's comments, Mr Lenihan said: “It doesn’t make much difference because all of the departments have been consulted.”
When asked if there was a rift between the Department of Finance and the Ministers who criticised the McCarthy report, he said: “There are always rifts between the Department of Finance and the other different Government departments.”
He said all departments had been told they should fully consider McCarthy’s recommendations and if they did not propose to implement them should provide alternatives.
Minister for Arts, Sports and Tourism Martin Cullen and Minister of Community, Rural Gaeltacht Affairs Eamon Ó Cuiv have both previously criticised the report, which recommends that the functions of their departments should be transferred to other departments.
Speaking this afternoon, Mr Ó Cuiv said the Government had been consistent over the Bord Snip proposals "from the very beginning".
"McCarthy is a menu, that it's not just some programme that is going to be implemented . . . we published it in the summer, and that gives us . . . time to look at the proposals, to analyse them, and to decide how we are going to make the cuts that we will have to make to live within the budget that will be available."
Asked on RTÉ's News at Oneif he was proposing alternatives to cuts proposed by McCarthy, Mr Ó Cuiv said this was a process would go on throughout the Autumn.
"What the Tánaiste said yesterday . . . what the Taoiseach and Minister for Finance have been saying consistently is, that those people who think we will just take the whole of McCarthy and implement it exactly as he wrote it would be wrong. There are a lot of good ideas in it, there are ideas that are not practicable."
Referring to the recommendation that his Ministry of Arts, Sports and Tourism be closed and its
functions allocated to other areas, Mr Ó Cuiv said functions transferred between departments "all the time" and that the important thing was the services provided rather than what department provided them.
"In relation to specific proposals, what were are saying is that the decisions on those will be made in the estimates and the budgetary process," the Minister said.
Pointing out the €1 million cut mentioned in the Dáil over the closure of Garda stations was part of €5.3 billion proposed by McCarthy, he said: "You can see a proposal like that might not be key to the decision-making that Government have to make."
