Labour Eamon Gilmore has accused Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan of collapsing the agreement with the public service unions in order to aid his political ambitions.
Mr Gilmore made the claim as he condemned the Government’s failure last week to reach agreement with the unions as “stupid”, “short-sighted” and “at worst devious”.
During testy exchanges at leaders’ questions in the Dail, he said “the bottom line, Taoiseach is that you have a Minister for Finance who is now so anxious to get his hands on your job that he was prepared to sink this agreement”.
But rejecting the claim Brian Cowen said that “in any discussions I had with the congress of trade unions in relation to these matters he (the Minister for Finance) accompanied me to all of those meetings and full and frank discussions were had between all of the parties concerned”.
Mr Gilmore claimed that “from the time there was an agreement in prospect he (Mr Lenihan) had his representatives out on the airwaves, doing his damndest to undermine the work that was going on”.
He described the move as “stupid and it was short-sighted”, and he asked the Taoiseach to explain why he had “thrown away an opportunity to get long-term reforms in the public service for a quick one-year fix for next year, purely, it would appear, on the basis of Fianna Fáil's political need”.
Rejecting the claim Mr Cowen said “that is completely at variance with the facts. A proposal was put to the Government which I said would be considered by Cabinet. It was considered by Cabinet but unfortunately it did not meet the first requirement on the amount of savings that would be required.”
Mr Cowen said the “immediate problem related to the fact that savings of the order of €1.3 billion would have been required, not only in 2010 but certainly thereafter. Unfortunately this was not possible to confirm with the detail that would be required beyond 2010.”
He added that “that there is a common positive vision about how we might transform public services in the future were we to be able to go back to those issues on another occasion”.
Mr Cowen said “we should seek to re-engage on that changed agenda”, Taoiseach said but Mr Gilmore intervened, shouting “who are you going to engage with”. The Labour leader added that the unions “couldn’t trust ye”, and “you blew it”.
But the Taosieach insisted that unless they engaged on a reform agenda “over the comping years, we put at risk the ability to maintain present remuneration levels without further reform”.
Earlier Enda Kenny contrasted the proposed budget cuts in social welfare benefits with the fraud revealed in the RTE Primetime Investigates documentary on Monday night. He said fraud could be up to 10 per cent of the department of social and family affairs’ budget.
“It appears as if the department of social welfare and the Minister for Social Welfare have been entirely incompetent in dealing with the scale of fraud or robbery from the taxpayer’s pocket,” he said.
But Mr Cowen retorted that “to suggest that 10 per cent is defrauded is not correct. It’s not the contention of either the programme or the evidence, that was put before the public last night”.
