The fall-out from yesterday¿s Cabinet decision to abandon the proposal to publicly fund a national sports stadium continued this morning with Opposition parties describing the news as a "shambles", a "fiasco" and a "debacle".
Fine Gael leader Mr Enda Kenny said the decision was "a devastating personal blow to the Taoiseach" and made a "shambles" of the joint-application to host the European soccer championships in 2008.
He also hit out at the Government's move to have the FAI's stadium bid abandoned. "The fact that the Eircom Park facility - which would give a home to the FAI it never had - was literally shafted has made a complete shambles of this," he said on RTÉ radio.
The pursuit of private funding for the project will not succeed he said, concluding: "Stadium Ireland is dead".
Sinn Féin spokesman on sport, Mr Martin Ferris, said the Government's handling of the issue demonstrated its "total lack of real long-term planning and effective decision-making".
Mr Ferris said: "The Taoiseach went into the General Election promising the public that the National Stadium project would go ahead. Now we are told that no Exchequer funding will be forthcoming and the project will rely solely on private sector funding - if any takers can be found.
"This is a fiasco. Are we now to have a situation where the site at Abbotstown, on which massive amounts of State money has already been spent, will be handed over to private developers to construct a stadium which will be run on a purely profit basis?" he asked.
But also speaking on RTE Radio this morning, the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy said the Government's "contribution" to any future development would be the land at Abbotstown.
He also rejected claims the Government had broken election promises and said the Fianna Fail manifesto said spending commitments were "predicated" on the state of the public finances.
"These are changed circumstances in Ireland ... we will not repeat the mistakes of the past, we will have prudent economic and fiscal management and whatever decisions are needed to ensure that, we will do so," he said.
His statement drew an angry response from Labour's Mr Brendan Howlin, who described Mr McCreevy's comments as "a virtually unprecedented display of political cynicism".
Mr Howlin said: "The emphasis in this morning's interview on everything being dependent on the state of public finances is in stark contrast to the lavish commitments that were given unconditionally during the election campaign and the absolute pledges that there would be no cutbacks."
He said the there was no mention of conditions during the general election when the Taoiseach pledged to cut hospital waiting lists nor when McCreevy wrote to the then Fine Gael leader, Mr Michael Noonan, confirming there were no significant overruns nor cutbacks planned.
"Minister McCreevy must also share a huge part of the responsibility for the Stadium Ireland finance debacle. As Minister for Finance he sanctioned the expenditure of huge sums of public money on what was essentially a vanity project for the Taoiseach.
"Minister McCreevy is all the more responsible because he stood to be the political beneficiary of the transfer of the State Laboratories from the Abbotstown location to a site in his own constituency in Cellbridge, Co Kildare, at a cost of almost €200m," Mr Howlin added.