TAOISEACH BRIAN Cowen has insisted that services for disabilities would be maintained as he faced Opposition accusations that he had “sleepwalked the country into recession” and “squandering the boom”.
Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny claimed Mr Cowen had “created this mess” and was responsible for Ireland’s economy “winning the losers’ league”. He claimed the exchequer figures would be “probably the worst figures on our economy ever seen”.
Labour leader Eamon Gilmore accused Mr Cowen of being full of “bluster” and said “bluster, Taoiseach, will not get you out of this”.
However, speaking in the Dáil in advance of the publication of the exchequer figures for the first half of the year, Mr Cowen defended the Government’s handling of the economy.
He said “we have the ability to weather this storm better than ever before”, but “there is no painless or easy formula that the Opposition might like to suggest that this can be done by”.
“We are setting out to work within the budget spending limits we have set ourselves, and ensure that, with the extra costs there will now be as a result of rising unemployment, greater than predicted, we will find savings in other areas to deal with it.”
Mr Gilmore, who told the Taoiseach that “from the best of economic times you have walked this country into the red”, highlighted cutbacks in disability services.
He said “people with disabilities finishing school need a day service, but they are being told the HSE has no money”.
He said there would be talk about the economy, exchequer returns and “billions”, but “it all comes down to the worries that people will have over the summer about whether their son or daughter will get a service in a day care centre” or the concern of a woman who depends on a personal assistant to get out of bed, shower and cook, that she might lose that personal assistant.
He said terms such as “corrective action” were “economy-speak and political-speak”, but when the Taoiseach “talks about painful adjustments, who will bear the pain? Is it these parents and these people with disabilities?”
Through repeated Opposition heckling, Mr Cowen stressed that “we are trying to ensure that those people are not the sufferers”.
He said the “€50 million for disability services that we are providing this year will come through”.
The HSE’s development plan for 2008 would be proceeding and would be finalised within the next 10 days. It included “new day places for young people leaving school and additional therapy supports for pre-school children and children with autism”.
He said “we must cut our cloth to meet our measure on the basis of the revenues available”.
The Taoiseach stressed that “we will be working within the approved spending limits that we have set ourselves and we will ensure we devise a budgetary strategy and carry out the estimates process and the next budget in a way that will see this economy recover as soon as possible”.
Mr Kenny, accusing the Government of being “a shower of wasters”, said the Taoiseach had been in charge of the economy for three years as minister for finance and “increased spending to a reckless point with no return for the taxpayer”.
Rejecting the claim, Mr Cowen said the Opposition had doubled the debt in government but “we have halved the debt”. During that time “we have seen unprecedented capital investment which has built up this economy”.
