Labour has claimed that the Government is the worst Ireland has ever had, saying the prospect that it will govern for four more years is "unthinkable", writes Mark Brennock, Chief Political Correspondent.
At a press conference in Limerick marking the Fianna Fáil/PD Coalition's first anniversary, the Labour Party leader, Mr Pat Rabbitte, said it had "broken dozens of promises, attempted to distort its record, launched a series of savage attacks on essential spending and expected the most vulnerable people in our society to bear the cost of their incompetent economic management".
He published a document which he said "catalogues a cutback or broken promise for each of the first 52 weeks that this Government has been in office".
The cuts listed include the absence of funding for the health strategy, cuts in planned school building, increases in college registration fees, increased charges for electricity, gas, motor tax and VHI premiums, the failure to achieve promised child benefit increases and reductions in places on Community Employment Schemes.
"The thought that Ireland has to endure four more years of this incompetent, hypocritical and dishonest Government is unthinkable," he said, "and yet they are clearly digging in, apparently determined to ignore all criticism and to carry on doing as much damage as they can to the economic and social fabric of our community."
He said that while the Government was re-elected, it was "planning many of the cutbacks now being implemented at precisely the same time as they were making promises to the electorate".
The party document claimed that the 2002 election had been "bought" with public money.
"We now have cutbacks in Government spending, price increases and spiralling inflation. We have hundreds of hospital bed closures, no progress on hundreds of run-down schools, community employment schemes dismantled, numerous stealth taxes and price hikes, not one extra garda, not one extra medical card, the abolition of the first-time home buyers' grant."
Fianna Fáil TD Mr Eoin Ryan accused Labour of putting forward "a constant stream of hysterical accusations". Ireland still had a GDP per capita at 122 per cent of the EU average, he said, and an unemployment rate well below the European average.
"Labour also ignores the fact that when it was last in government, hospital waiting lists rose by 27 per cent, school funding was frozen and we had the highest level of recorded crime in the history of the State."