MAIN ISSUES:FINE GAEL will refuse to bail out Anglo Irish Bank and will also conduct a "rigorous and open investigation" into the banking scandal, leader Enda Kenny said at his party's national conference in Killarney this weekend.
In the course of his leader’s speech on Saturday night, Mr Kenny said the country was finished with “golden circles and the favoured few”.
Earlier, deputy leader Richard Bruton told delegates that Anglo Irish Bank should be handed over to creditors when the State guarantee ends in September. He said there was a moral or economic case for the repayment of debts that “Anglo Irish built up under Sean FitzPatrick”.
Mr Kenny told the conference that banks were looking for further sacrifices from taxpayers. “Unless there is a change of Government, the banks will get what they want. There is no limit to what Fianna Fáil will do to protect their powerful friends,” he said.
He also promised there would be no whitewash. “The current secrecy will not be tolerated. We will carry out a rigorous and open investigation to find out exactly why the banking scandal happened. We will hold people responsible, even if they are Ministers.”
During the conference, the party outlined what it said would be the three pillars of its plan to restore the economy. They were: a jobs strategy that would provide employment or placements for 180,000 people; a new health system based on the universal insurance model in the Netherlands and radical political reform.
Mr Kenny said his reforms for the electoral system included a reduction of 20 TDs in the Dáil; the abolition of the Seanad; more accountability and some form of mechanism to increase the representation of women, notwithstanding the rejection of female quotas by his parliamentary party.
“I am absolutely determined to bring more women into politics,” he said. Mr Kenny accused the Government of being too narrow in its focus by believing the only cure was “balancing the books”.
“The biggest problem in Ireland is that we have 434,000 people out of work. Many thousands more are being forced to emigrate,” he said. The jobs policies were outlined by party energy spokesman Simon Coveney and enterprise spokesman Leo Varadkar.
Speaking on RTÉ's This Weekyesterday, Mr Kenny accepted that some of the €18 billion required for the party's NewEra plan would require borrowing and that the five commercially-driven State companies would charge customers for services including water and electricity.
He also said that the adoption of the Dutch system of universal health insurance would involve significant redundancies from the HSE, although some staff would be recruited by the companies that would provide health insurance.
“The HSE will not continue to exist in its current form. If the HSE were to operate the Dutch model in the way they have operated the two-tier system here, there will still be a lot of problems,” he said.
Mr Bruton also said Fine Gael would oppose the Government’s proposals for €3 billion in savings in public spending next year, saying it favoured no more than €2 billion in cuts.