Office of Public Works to make 'savings of €75m'

THE DEPARTMENT of Justice is to make "required savings" of €8.731 million this year, some of it through sharing of services "between and within agencies", according to Minister Dermot Ahern.

Earlier during heated exchanges with Labour leader Eamon Gilmore, Taoiseach Brian Cowen revealed that there would be €75 million in savings in the Office of Public Works. Challenged as to what that included he would only say "various projects" and this would be detailed during the debate on the economy.

During that debate the Justice Minister said they would take a "long hard look" at each of the 30 bodies associated with the department to see if it played an essential role or if that function could be carried out by the department directly. Some €5.5 million is expected in "saving from efficiencies within the agencies and other bodies associated with the department".

They would "squeeze efficiencies" everywhere including "those elements of our national human rights infrastructure where an element of overlap and customer confusion may be emerging at this juncture".

While the "savings" would not be easy, the amount was "modest" and represented less than 1 per cent of a budget of €2.68 billion.

He said the department was already saving about €2 million annually through shared financial services including payment pro-cessing and payroll "within the larger justice agencies such as An Garda Síochána, the Courts and the Prison Service".

Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said "people no longer have any faith in the Taoiseach because when he was minister for finance he used every opportunity to tell Irish families and investors, in 2005 and 2006, that house prices were based on 'strong economic fundamentals'. We now know that he was being told exactly the opposite by domestic and international experts."

He asked: "Does the Taoiseach realise the extent of the despair felt by young people faced with negative equity in up to 100,000 cases?" He said "we are witnessing the biggest deterioration in the public finances of any advanced economy, with Ireland now facing the ignominious prospect of being the only country this year to breach the 3 per cent borrowing limit set by the EU's growth and stability pact. If the rest of the world economy is catching a cold, we are surely suffering from pneumonia."

Mr Gilmore said "it is becoming increasingly clear that the so-called package which was announced with great fanfare by the Government yesterday, is only a very small picture of what it has in store for the people in the coming months". He said they were getting a "drip-drip feed of sneaky cuts and stealth taxes emerging during the summer months".

What the Government "is proposing will not create a single job in the private sector. All it will do is cut jobs and services in the public sector. This is not the forward-looking strategic approach that will restore confidence in the economy, reignite growth or lay down the basis for necessary future employment. It is a crude and conservative knee-jerk reaction, part of an emerging conservative consensus that views cuts in the public sector as the solution to a recession firmly rooted in the private sector." It would do nothing for the 54,000 people who lost their jobs in the past year.