BRIAN COWEN is still washing his hands of his part in the economic crash, Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny claimed yesterday.
Speaking about Mr Cowen’s speech on Thursday night in which he addressed the Government’s role in the banking crisis, Mr Kenny said: “Sorry is a word that Fianna Fáil do not recognise, they don’t understand. They’re out of touch with the real concerns, the anxieties and the truth and the reality of what Irish people now face every day.”
Mr Kenny said Mr Cowen, in defending his own personal handling of events, was refusing to acknowledge that he drove the economy “up on the rocks” for four years when he was in the Department of Finance.
“He expects everybody else to accept responsibility for it but not him. He hasn’t the courage to come out and say ‘yes I made a mistake, apologise to the Irish people and do what I can to rectify it.
“It’s another example of hands being washed by those in charge, a refusal to accept responsibility for their part in destroying the Irish economy and heaping economic woes and depression upon so many people.”
Mr Kenny said there were claims of “green shoots” and “turning the corners”, but he didn’t “see much evidence of that on the ground. “The ESRI tell us another 70,000 more jobs will be lost this year and 60,000 will emigrate.
“We need now to have a situation where you have a real investment in job creation.”
Speaking during a visit to Cork yesterday where he was hosting a frontbench meeting, Mr Kenny said Mr Cowen claimed in 2007 that the fundamentals of the economy were never stronger, that our banks were well-capitalised and that the Government had taken measures to protect the economy.
“We are now in a position where he sat in the Department of Finance for four years when there was evidence from Fine Gael and other groups that we were concentrating too much on the property area and on that kind of development that we had lost focus on competition, on forcing down Government costs and on concentrating on exports,” Mr Kenny said.