Taoiseach Enda Kenny rounded on his Fine Gael predecessor John Bruton for his claim that Ireland faced 10 more years of austerity budgets.
“I was here when John Bruton was here and I think he made two attempts at a budget, neither of which was passed,” said Mr Kenny. “I do not agree with his assertion.”
Mr Kenny, who served as a minister in Mr Bruton’s cabinet in the 1990s, was responding to a demand by Sinn Féin deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald for a review of the programme for government.
“Has the Taoiseach listened to what the people have told him or is he listening instead to his predecessor as taoiseach and Fine Gael leader, John Bruton, who believes we face another 10 or 15 years of cutbacks and brutal austerity budgets?”
Mr Kenny said the Government would not change political direction. “We have set out targets and objectives and they must be achieved.”
Scale of adjustment
He said the scale of the adjustment in the October budget for 2015 could not be determined now. The Government had yet to review the state of the national accounts later this year.
“I have already said it is a priority for the Government that where flexibility can be shown in the budget it will be shown to hard-pressed taxpayers.”
Ms McDonald said the people had sent the Taoiseach and his Government a clear message in Friday’s elections. “They clearly rejected the policies of the Government and said it had no mandate to implement the misery it has been inflicting on families or the damage it has been causing to society,” she added.
“The people have now told the Government to end its brutal agenda of relentless austerity, to reverse its policy of taking medical cards from sick children, of imposing a family home tax, of introducing a water tax and of inflicting vicious cuts on supports to the most vulnerable citizens.”
Mr Kenny said the question for the future would be: who did the people want in charge of the nation’s economy ?
"Do they want Fianna Fáil, who wrecked it and put the problem on the shoulders of every person in the country and the next generation, or do they want the Sinn Féin party, which shouts from every crossroads that everything should be free and which has no plan or no notion of pointing out who will pay for it?
"Let me assure the deputy that if this Government, of Fine Gael and Labour, did not make the difficult decisions it had to make, this country would be consigned to penury for the next generation because of the catastrophic effects of what had been left behind."
