CURRENT ECONOMIC difficulties should be used to bring about necessary reforms, according to Fine Gael deputy leader and finance spokesman Richard Bruton.
On RTÉ Radio's News at One, Mr Bruton said: "Everyone has this sense of crisis now and it is an opportunity to push through reforms that would have been unthinkable up to recently.
“You have to use this crisis as an opportunity to totally reinvent Ireland, to reinvent the way we run our Government, the way we spend our money, the way we do our business, the way we protect employment, the way we do social partnership.
“We have to totally reinvent ourselves and the catalyst of [this] crisis is the opportunity to drive through those changes.”
Changes in the budget system were required in, for example, the allocation of State funding to health services.
According to Mr Bruton, such funding should be based on performance: “You have to drive it that the most efficient hospitals will get the money, so that the ones that can deliver patient care will get more money.
“We don’t have that concept of performance driving our public spending and it’s not just in health, it’s right through the public service. We have to radically reform that.”
Mr Bruton said the driving force of the emergency budget must be “to cut the costs in the sheltered sector of the economy and become more efficient”.