THE Fianna Fail spokesman on finance, Mr Charles McCreevy, described the Budget as "an attempt to buy off the electorate". It would not have been introduced except in an election year.
He warned the Government, however, that the electorate was too sophisticated to be bought off in this way.
The next administration would have "to do something very dramatic" to correct the course adopted by the Minister, he told the Dail. As always when corrective action was necessary it was the poorest and weakest sections that suffered most.
At a time when caution should have been the keynote of policy, the Minister had allowed himself to be beaten off course by his Cabinet colleagues and let gross Government spending rise by 20 per cent. "He does this when he and his advisers know it to be wrong."
It was a pity that Mr Quinn did not go ahead with his resignation as he threatened to do last month. He would have saved himself the embarrassment of delivering this Budget speech. "Never in the history of the State has any Minister been in such a favourable budgetary position and never has any Budget failed so spectacularly to live up to expectations."
There was a glorious chance for the Minister to leave his mark on Irish economic development, but all he left was "a toe-mark on the seashore to be washed away by the smallest wave".
The Budget contained no economic strategy other than to revive the electoral fortunes of the current Government. It attempted "to please the many but that could be a surefire way to antagonise all".
The way the Government behaved over the last two years would do lasting damage. This Budget attempted to increase public spending while cutting taxation. That would reduce the room for manoeuvre in future.
An attempt by Fianna Fail to spend its way out of a crisis in 1977 had not worked and he believed the strategy being pursued by this Government now would not work, either.
The Budget was described by the PD spokesman on finance as "the great damp squib". Mr Michael McDowell said it had been portrayed as securing the Government's electoral future. "But all I can tell you is that the people will not be bought. This Budget is, in fact, the longest redundancy application form that has ever been composed and signed by any Minister for Finance in any administration in the history of this State.
"It represents the high point of abandonment of every commitment which this Government of renewal made when it went into office just two years ago.
The Government, he added, had promised to control public spending, but it had exceeded its -targets. "The Minister's own budgetary tables show that we are dealing with a 7 per cent increase in spending this year.
And the truth was that the 7 per cent was a phoney underestimate of the real underlying rate of increase in public spending.
The eminent Dr Garret FitzGerald had reprimanded the Minister, in his first Budget, for using gross increases rather than net increases to determine the real measure of increase in public spending.
Using the formula which Dr FitzGerald had said the Minister so wrongly abandoned, the net increase in public spending this year was 8.2 per cent, which was four times the rate of inflation.
Mr McDowell said he sympathised with the Minister on a personal level. "I sympathise with him particularly in the manner in which he was betrayed by the Tanaiste, because it is quite clear he tried to take a stance to control the explosion in public spending this year. And it is clear he was even prepared, at one stage, to lay his job on the line, but was dissuaded by other people from doing so.
There were aspects of the Budget for which Mr Quinn should be commended, he added. One was finally agreeing that PRSI was a tax on work and that its reduction was a pro-job step. He also commended the 1 per cent decrease in the standard rate of income tax.
Ireland, he said, under "unreconstructed, left-wing socialist parties holding the reins of government" had held tax rates at the level they were today. The wealthy barrister, doctor, businessman or property developer did not pay 48 per cent tax. They used a variety of schemes to minimise their tax liabilities.
"It is the ordinary worker, earning well below the average industrial wage, who pays 48 per-cent.