OPPOSITION RESPONSE:THE BUDGET measures announced by Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan are "going to make a bad situation a great deal worse", according to Fine Gael deputy leader and finance spokesman Richard Bruton.
Accusing the Minister of "a wrong-headed approach", Mr Bruton said: "There's no reform, no sign of reform there . . . There is no grand strategy."
Mr Bruton said the Government had "jacked up the taxes" and the Budget would add "40 per cent to inflation next year". The cost for those on middle incomes "will be €2,500 between the taxes and the stealth taxes".
"This is the wrong budget," he said. "There is no recovery through reform [here]." The Government has not "at any stage looked at the core issues".
The Budget was "going to make the construction depression even longer" and he added: "There isn't even a sense they are getting their public finances back on track."
On the proposed ministerial pay cuts, he said: "This would be of value if we saw it as part of a serious reform of public spending."
Nothing had been done about the new bureaucracies created by the appointment of three new ministers of state last year.
"Their example is a waste of time," Mr Bruton said, but he would give "one cheer" for the ministerial pay cut.
Labour Party leader Éamon Gilmore said the Budget had "mercilessly targeted middle-income families, protected the interests of the super-wealthy and failed to take any significant steps to protect the poor and the vulnerable.
"The people who will suffer most . . . are typically the nurse, the teacher, the office manager, the skilled tradesman, the small builder: people struggling to make ends meet, to pay the mortgage each month, to cover the cost of childcare or sending a child to university, to meet the cost of drugs for a sick child.
"These families will pay more in tax and will have to pay more for a range of public services and the full extent of these additional charges will only become clear over the next few days."
Sinn Féin health spokesman Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin said: "The minimal increase in the health budget is well below inflation and will lead to massive cutbacks across the health services.
"At the same time people will be forced to pay higher charges for AE visits and for medicines. Means testing for medical cards for older people is being reintroduced, another example of the totally incoherent health policy of this Government," Mr Ó Caoláin added.
"Services will be slashed, patients will suffer and avoidable deaths will increase among those on lowest incomes who depend most on our public health services."
Labour's social affairs spokeswoman Róisín Shortall condemned the decision to "effectively abolish" the Combat Poverty Agency as an independent body and integrate it into the Department of Social and Family Affairs.
This move "represents an absolute betrayal by Fianna Fáil and the Greens of the poor and the vulnerable in this country".
"Subsuming the Combat Poverty Agency into the Department of Social and Family Affairs will totally neuter the agency and rob it of its independence," she added.
