POLITICAL REACTION:THERE HAS been a mixed response from Opposition parties to the McCarthy report with a welcome for some aspects from Fine Gael and Labour, along with strong reservations about other proposed measures such as the social welfare cuts.
Fine Gael deputy leader Richard Bruton said the report would be “an important input into a process because he’s doing something that Fine Gael has been calling for for years, and that is to seriously look at how do we re- engineer our public services to deliver more with less”.
Asked if his party was endorsing the report, he said: “There’s a lot of valuable material in this, but there are also issues that I think would shock people. The notion that you would seek to charge the most vulnerable people for their medicines is something that will shock people.”
Labour leader Eamon Gilmore said it was “a very substantive report and we are going to give it a lot of detailed examination . . . there a lot of things that the Labour Party would agree with in this report”. The report had “identified, for example, both at national and at local level, bodies where there is duplication of activity, and there is scope for that to be sorted out”.
But Labour could not support a 5 per cent cut in social welfare or deep cuts in overseas development aid. “You get this kind of feeling at times reading it that there’s a bit of, ‘This is Ireland as viewed from a snug in Doheny Nesbitt’s’, and it looks very different when you see it actually on the ground.”
Sinn Féin TD Aengus Ó Snodaigh said: “The vast majority of the proposals in the ‘Bord Snip Nua’ report should not be implemented . . . Colm McCarthy has always had a right-wing political agenda. The cuts in this report reflect that agenda.”
Socialist Party MEP Joe Higgins has called for the trade union movement to build a united campaign against proposals on the public service.
Cllr Richard Boyd Barrett of the People Before Profit Alliance said: “There is now a crying need for a vigorous campaign to defend public services and the incomes of workers and those dependent on social welfare.”