FINE GAEL was yesterday targeted for repeated political attacks by Fianna Fáil and Labour, with both claiming there was a €5 billion “black hole” in its fiscal plan.
Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin and his Labour counterpart, Eamon Gilmore, also challenged Enda Kenny to explain how Fine Gael’s plan to reduce public sector numbers by 30,000 would not affect front-line services. They claimed Fine Gael would introduce a raft of stealth taxes if elected to government.
During yesterday’s three-way debate on TG4, Mr Martin and Mr Gilmore were also severely critical of the Fine Gael policy to end compulsory Irish for the Leaving Certificate.
Mr Kenny said attack ads by Labour in newspapers were a sign of panic at Fine Gael’s strong showing in the polls. Mr Kenny also rejected Mr Martin’s claims of a “black hole” in the Fine Gael fiscal plan. He said Mr Martin had some explaining to do for the period of 14 years when he was a minister.
He said the country faced an economic burden not seen since the foundation of the State.
“Micheál Martin’s thumbprints and fingerprints are all over the economic wreckage,” Mr Kenny said.
Mr Gilmore said Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil were “on the same page” as to their fiscal plans. “They have to come forward with where it is they intend to impose additional taxes, what additional cuts they will make and how they will take jobs out [of the public sector],” he said.
“You cannot take €10 billion over the next three years without doing damage to employment and economic growth”, he said.
Mr Martin said Fianna Fáil’s analysis showed Fine Gael had hidden a lot of stealth taxes in their manifesto.
“In the back door they have a lot of taxes coming through. They say they will save €5 billion through eliminating waste without saying where it is coming from,” he said.
Mr Martin insisted Fianna Fáil would do better than opinion polls suggested.
In the TG4 debate, Mr Martin claimed that Fianna Fáil had not destroyed the country. “Yes, we have problems. The first challenge is to reduce the deficit and solve the fiscal crisis. We have done it before. We can create jobs again,” he said.
However, Mr Gilmore countered that Fianna Fáil had destroyed the country and Mr Kenny said the €35 billion put into Anglo Irish Bank could have created 200,000 jobs.
He said his visits to German chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission president José Manuel Barroso were intended to put them on notice that Fine Gael wanted to renegotiate the interest rate on the IMF-EU deal and explore burden-sharing when it came to bondholders.
Mr Gilmore claimed that the worst decision made by the Government was the bank guarantee and said it had destroyed the country.
Fine Gael enterprise spokesman Richard Bruton later said that the attacks by Labour and Fianna Fáil were a “sign of desperation”.
“We have set out a €9 billion adjustment. It’s fully costed. There is no black hole. There is no concealment. We have set out our stalls,” he told RTÉ News.
He did concede that some of the taxes and cuts listed by Labour newspaper advertisements, including water charges, would be introduced, but said Fine Gael had never tried to hide them. He also said the annual €238 for water charges suggested in the advertisements was a “made-up figure”.
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