MINISTER FOR Finance Brian Lenihan has insisted the McCarthy report remains “key to the budgetary process”, and said the Government is committed to sorting out the problems facing the country.
The Opposition accused the Government of being in disarray over budgetary strategy after remarks by Tánaiste Mary Coughlan in the Dáil yesterday that many of the cuts recommended by the McCarthy report did not make sense. Asked about the comments, Mr Lenihan said: “It doesn’t make much difference because all of the departments have been consulted.”
He said Ministers were always anxious about anything touching on their area of responsibility but the Taoiseach and the Government collectively were committed to taking decisions.
When asked if there was a rift between the Department of Finance and the Ministers who criticised the McCarthy report, he said: “There are always rifts between the Department of Finance and the other different Government departments.”
He said all departments had been told they should fully consider McCarthy’s recommendations and if they did not propose to implement them should provide alternatives.
He also pointed out that Ms Coughlan had said in the Dáil yesterday morning that the ultimate decision on where to find the €4 billion of savings was a matter for the Government. He repeated the Tánaiste’s invitation to the Opposition to offer constructive suggestions about how that could be achieved.
Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said Ms Coughlan’s remarks had sent a clear message that the report would be shelved, and he claimed the comments had been delivered with the authority of the Taoiseach.
He said the Government did not know where it was going and its lack of action was a demonstration of incompetence at the highest level. Mr Kenny said Ireland had been “led down a garden path by inaction, ineffectiveness and incompetence from government for the last 10 years”.
Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore said the Tánaiste’s remarks were part of a pattern involving a number of Ministers refusing to take responsibility for the recommendations made in the McCarthy report.
“The attempt by the Tánaiste Mary Coughlan in the Dáil to distance herself from key recommendations made in the report of ‘An Bord Snip’ and the subsequent statement of rebuke by the Minister for Finance, in which he insisted that the report remained ‘key to the budgetary process’, is an indication of the disarray in Government,” said Mr Gilmore.
He added that since the report was published certain Ministers had tried to distance themselves from the recommendations despite the fact that many of these did not originate with members of the board but were based on submissions made by the Department of Finance and other Government departments.