Labour has called for major increases in spending on social services and infrastructural development, and has accused the Government of starving public services at a time of unprecedented national wealth.
Announcing its budgetary strategy document yesterday, the party's finance spokesman, Mr Derek McDowell, said Government spending plans were "quite spectacularly conservative". The Government was "playing on the fears of the 1980s" to justify its overly cautious approach.
However, it was "very difficult to overestimate the good financial position we are in". He called for current spending to be increased from £2.43 billion in 1999 to £3.7 billion in 2000. The Government has proposed an increase to £3 billion.
He said the £40 billion National Development Plan (NDP) published today represented no increase in percentage terms on the last plan despite the transformed economic circumstances and the growing belief that the State's infrastructure cannot deal with the level of economic growth.
If leaks to the press were accurate it was to be a "highly conservative document" consisting mainly of projects that were planned already. There were to be no new rail lines, no new motorways and no radical overhaul of Dublin's rail network.
The rail infrastructure would be merely upgraded rather than developed further, and spending on transport generally involved "tinkering with the existing system or plans developed in advance of the last National Plan".
"As the ESRI has already identified, the NDP will largely consist of off-the-shelf projects. As such it is hardly new at all." It was "a series of six-year departmental spending estimates" that involved tinkering with existing plans and contained few initiatives.
Asked how much Labour thought should be spent on the plan, he said the ESRI had talked of £50 billion, while his party leader, Mr Ruairi Quinn, had suggested it should be as high as £70 billion.
If the construction industry did not have the capacity to carry out the volume of work required by a larger plan, capacity should be imported for major projects.
He criticised the Government for putting "all of this year's £5.5 billion Exchequer surplus into paying off the national debt early or pre-funding future pension liabilities". Labour would invest most of this in services or infrastructure.
He maintained that current Government spending as a proportion of national income was the lowest in Europe and said the Government was determined to reduce it further. This could create "an increasingly privatised society where public squalor and personal affluence co-exist".
He said the tide was turning "against the view that public spending and public investment are detrimental to the economy. In fact the opposite is being recognised as the case".
Spending should track growth in GDP, according to the document. The party would spend this extra money on an increase in the old-age contributory pension to £118 per week over two years; linking social welfare increases to wages; a phased extension of the medical card to all children under 12 and people over 66; £150 million extra for services for the mentally handicapped, disabled and people suffering from dementia; greater subsidy for public transport; remedial teachers in every school; and increased child benefit.